How students use Facebook

This study investigates the way in which first year students use Facebook. An overview of recent studies on Facebook usage and a survey is presented. The latter is an online questionnaire on the Facebook activities of 618 students (78.6 % of all first year students) of the Media department of Hogeschool van Amsterdam. Previous studies identified four major Facebook activities: 1) information sharing receiving/providing information and generating ideas), 2) sharing for educational purposes (for learning, problem solving and sharing work), 3) social purposes (retrieving personal information about others or themselves, chatting, making appointments and generally keeping in touch) and 4) leisure (gaming and relaxing). The questionnaire’s answers were grouped accordingly and then compared, to provide a better understanding of how students use Facebook. In addition, a range of variables were measured in the survey,in order to map student characteristics such as gender, age, place of birth, living arrangements and the socio-economic status of their parents. Those variables were compared with the Facebook activities using PAWS Statistics 18.0 (formally SPSS)to determine any correlatio