Social Media and Child Academic Performance in Primary Schools in Ibanda Municipality, Ibanda District

ABSTRACT

 Social media are web-based services that gives individual the opportunity to create either a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, add a list of others to with they share a connection and view and transverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system. Therefore, this study was carried out with the aim of examining the impact of use of social media on students’ academic performance in Ibanda municipality. In other to measure social media platforms a questionnaire was developed based on past literatures. The independent variables includes: time appropriateness, time duration, Nature of Usage, Health Addiction, Friend-People connection and security/privacy problems while the dependent variable was student academic performance. This research adopted cross-sectional and descriptive research design. It also employed the use of cross sectional survey method using survey questionnaires that contains 42 items with a Likert Scale (Disagree-i and 5 for Agree). The sample of 45 respondents was used from Ibanda municipality schools was selected using convenient sampling method. The data collected was analyzed using description means and regression via SPSS 21. The Pearson’s correlation coefficients of four independent are correlated with student’s academic performance while two are not. However, using the regression analysis four variables is significant which include: causes, nature of Usage and solutions while Time duration and security/privacy problems are not significant. Thus considering the abnormal use of Social media platforms by students in Ibanda municipality Ibanda district