Regresar

Influence of Social Networks on Teenagers’ Social Skills

Abstract:

The current work studies how high school teenagers from Ecuador use social networks and how it impacts both genders’ social skills development in general and their face-to-face social interaction in particular. The population included 742 students; a proportional stratified and nonprobability sampling was applied to get n = 196 students. The instrument consisted of a survey and a Likert scale (with 0.916 reliability index). Results showed that Facebook is the most popular social network among teenagers (they spend more than 3 h on it daily). On average teenagers have poor social skills: Cognitive social skills are poorly developed while emotional, instrumental and communicative skills are moderately developed due to the use of social networks. An ANOVA comparison with a Tukey post-hoc test was carried out about social skills development across gender. It showed that male adolescents had social skills more developed than females (statistically significant difference p = 0.013). However, it didn’t highlight any emotional and instrumental social skills significant gender difference (p > 0.05); finally, both social communication skills (p = 0.032) and social cognitive skills (p = 0.001) reflected significant differences between male and female teenagers.