INFLUENCE OF SOCIAL MEDIA USAGE ON THE INFORMATION BEHAVIOUR OF UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS IN SELECTED UNIVERSITIES IN KWARA STATE, NIGERIA

Abstract Today, information has been seen as heavily stressed factor that shapes the society, particularly the introduction of social media technology. This study therefore examined the influence of social media usage on the information behaviour of undergraduate students in selected universities in Kwara State, Nigeria. Five (5) research objectives were formulated for this study. The study adopted descriptive survey research design. The population for this study comprised of undergraduate students in Al-Hikmah University, Kwara State University and University of Ilorin. Israel (2003) sample size model was used to calculate the sample size with precision levels of 5% and confidence level of 95% and the recommended sample size was three hundred and eighty-five (385).A simple random sampling technique was used to select the sample from the population. The self-designed questionnaire was divided into five sections. Content-related approach of validation was conducted to ensure validity of the instrument while Cronbach alpha was used to test the reliability of the instrument and the overall reliability coefficient of the instrument is r= 0.679. The collated copies of the questionnaire were analysed with the IBM SPSS version 21.0. The presentations of the data for the research objectives were done using frequency counts and percentage table. The findings of the study shows Facebook as the most preferred social media tools by undergraduate students. The findings further revealed that there is a high usage of social media among undergraduate students. The findings also showed that the major purposes of using social media by undergraduate students are to connect with friends and for academic activities. However, the findings generally show that there is a significant relationship between purpose of using social media and information behaviour of undergraduate students. Since the benefits attached to using social media cannot be overemphasized,among numerous recommendations based on the findings, the study therefore recommended that, university management should ensure that they integrate social media applications into their learning and teaching system