Self-Regulation of Facebook Usage and Academic Performance of Students in Kenyan Universities

The increasing connectivity of places to the internet platform has led to widespread use of the social media platforms in homes, workplaces and schools wherein it is preffered by mostly the young people christened as dot.com generation. The use of social media platforms has a potential effect on the productivity of the users either in their places of work, schools and society in general. The purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of self-regulation of Facebook usage on academic performance among university students in Kenya. To achieve this objective, the study employed the ex post facto research design. Purposive and stratified random sampling methods were used to select partcipating campuses (n=4) from (N=12) and students (n=348) from (N=2698) third year regular students. Data was collected using a self administered questionnaire. The null hypothesis was tested at .01 level of significance using Kendall's tau_b correlation coefficient. The findings revealed that there was a moderate level of self regualtion on facebook usage by university students thus depicting ambivalence in attitude towards controlling the urge to use facebook when in site. Further, it was found that there was a significant relationship between the level of facebook self regulation and academic performance (p<.01). The implication of this finding was that the more one self regulates, the higher the likelihood of improving in academic performance. From the findings, it is recommended that universities incorporate time management skills in the curriculum in order to help the students achieve balance between leisure activites and academics. KEYWORDS: Facebook, Facebook usage, self-regulation, academic performance