EJISDC (2013) 56, 6, 1-7

IMPACT OF ONLINE SOCIAL NETWORKING ON YOUTH: CASE STUDY OF MAURITIUS

Kavi Kumar Khedo Computer Science and Engineering Department University of Mauritius k.khedo@uom.ac.mu Sheik Mohammad Roushdat Ally Elaheebocus Computer Science and Engineering Department University of Mauritius r.elaheebocus@uom.ac.mu Rajen Suntoo Department of Social Studies University of Mauritius r.suntoo@uom.ac.mu

Asslinah Mocktoolah Computer Science and Engineering Department University of Mauritius ashlinahmee@gmail.com

ABSTRACT Online social websites have achieved a phenomenal global growth over the last decade, attracting much attention from researchers worldwide. It is a known fact that young adults and teenagers are the most avid users of such sites. Based on the findings of several research studies in the Online Social Networks (OSNs) area, it has been found that these OSN sites are having a great impact on the lives of young people. But since most of the research works were carried out in other countries, it was found necessary and important to carry out a study in Mauritius on the impact of OSNs on the local youth. Such a study would provide an insight on the influence of OSNs on the behaviour and lifestyle of youngsters in the country. This paper reports the findings of a research work that was carried out in Mauritius targeting adolescents aging from 12 to 18 years where 4545 responses were collected through a survey. It was found that the majority of Mauritian youths were using OSNs on a large scale, mainly for communication purposes. According to this study, although OSNs have a positive impact on the adolescents, yet quite a large number of respondents reported having met with negative experiences on these online sites. KEYWORDS: Online Social Networks, Mauritian Youth, Communication 1. INTRODUCTION Online Social Networks (OSNs) have exploded in popularity during the past few years. The Mauritian population, more particularly the younger generation, has not been spared as most of them are now connected to OSNs on a daily basis. Since the beginning of the new millennium, the Mauritian government has put a lot of emphasis on the use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) among the youngsters. The number of Internet subscribers in Mauritius reached 370,000 in the year 2011 as compared to 284,000 in the year 2010 (ICT Indicators Portal), out of a population of 1,288,684 individuals (Population and Vital Statistics, 2011), representing a penetration rate of 22%. However, it should be noted that according to the Housing and Population Census (2011), there were 359,015 housing units in the republic of Mauritius and families tend to share Internet subscription, therefore putting the penetration rate at a much higher value. With this increase, more and more youths are getting access to the Internet and most of them have embraced the new trend of joining OSN sites, causing a change on the way they interact among each other. In the past, young people were keeping in touch with friends while hanging out at school or meeting up in The Electronic Journal of Information Systems in Developing Countries www.ejisdc.org

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public places while others developed friendships with people they had never met through pen pal services. OSNs have increased the capacity of teenagers to make and sustain friendships as well as having more regular communication with family and exploit new avenues of making online friends. Young people create elaborate profiles of themselves, connecting with their offline friends, friends of their friends and other users having similar interests. They then interact among themselves through the writing of comments, sending of private messages, chatting and other OSN communication features. The rapid adoption of social networking sites by teenagers around the world has led to many research studies, focusing on the role of OSNs in teenage social life, the dangers of OSNs particularly for young people and their impact on the lives of youngsters. In Mauritius, no in depth study has been carried out on the usage pattern of online social networks among young people and the impact of OSNs on their education and social life. This study is, therefore, an attempt to do so. The first part of the paper deals with a literature review of the impact of OSNs on the youth. Then follows an explanation on the methodology used for the sake of this article. In the second part, we shall analyse the findings of survey. Finally, a conclusion based on the study will be given. 2. BACKGROUND Given that teenagers from all over the world have adopted social networking sites in their daily lives, some significant questions were raised concerning the reasons teenagers flock to these sites and whether their online activities have implications on them. Boyd (2007) addressed some of these questions and examined the practices of teenagers on social network sites, focusing mostly on MySpace. MySpace was chosen out of others due to the mass popularity of the site at that time. Boyd (2007) found that teens mostly joined MySpace to maintain friendships with their pre-existing friend groups. This observation confirms the findings of a survey done by Pew Internet (Lenhart & Madden, 2007) stating that 91% of teens use these sites to stay in touch with their friends they meet frequently. According to Boyd (2007), gender had an influence in the participation of youngsters on OSN sites: Younger boys are more likely to participate than younger girls (46 percent vs. 44 percent) but older girls are far more likely to participate than older boys (70 percent vs. 57 percent). However, Boyd also noticed that race and social class did not play much role in the usage of these sites. He also found that that there are two types of non-participants, namely disenfranchised teens and conscientious objectors. The disenfranchised teens are mainly those with no Internet access, those whose parents restrict them from using OSNs and the teens who access Internet in places where OSNs are blocked, for example, in schools. On the other hand, conscientious objectors refer to those who do not feel that OSN is important for them or those obedient ones who simply respected their parents safety concerns. Larsen (2007) carried out a study on an OSN site in Denmark called Arto, which is mainly focused on youngsters between 13 and 17. The researcher created a profile on Arto so as to better communicate with the users. A qualitative questionnaire was conducted with the users who became her friends. She observed that the teenagers mainly use Arto to communicate with their friends and most of the users spend several hours a day logged on the website talking about non-virtual things such as boyfriends or girlfriends, school and parents. Her study showed that what young people do and talk about online is very close to their offline life and friends. The author also argued that OSN sites like Arto are simply a continuation of young peoples normal teenage life. While the media has raised a great hue-and-cry concerning the dangers of OSNs on youths, Larsen conducted another survey outlining the negative experiences the young OSNs users faced (Larsen and Ryberg, 2011). The study consisted of an online survey comprising The Electronic Journal of Information Systems in Developing Countries www.ejisdc.org

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primarily open-ended questions to provide an overview about the different experiences that youths between 12 and 18 years old had through the use of social networks. It was found that 31.5% teenagers expressed that they have had unpleasant experiences, some of which are threats, harassments, bullying, sexual comments or invitations and spams. However, most of these respondents drew attention to the fact that they could handle those bad experiences by blocking or reporting the users who harassed them. Another study carried out by the Australian Psychological Society (Mathews & Cameron, 2010) investigated on the social and psychological impact of OSNs and reported that many children and young adults had faced mostly cyber bullying. Some 28% of the survey participants reported that they had at least one bad social networking experience and for most respondents, the experiences reflected unwanted contacts, people posting inappropriate information and online bullying such as abusive messages and harassments. While research studies have noted these and other potential risks on OSNs, Tynes (2008) indicates that online socialisation through online social networks is more beneficial to the development of adolescents than they are harmful, helping them to learn helpful perspective-taking, argumentative, decision-making and critical thinking skills. The strongest point he raised was that OSN users were more globally aware since they had immediate access to global issues and had the chance to read about global events, thus OSNs acted as supports for their education. Alongside educational and psychological development, Tynes' research suggests that teenagers can also benefit emotionally and socially. Networking can aid adolescents as they explore their identities and can also fulfill the need for social support, intimacy, and autonomy. Tynes says that teenagers can learn racial and cultural issues while speaking with peers located on the other side of the country or even overseas. 3. METHODOLOGY AND APPROACH The objective of this study is to find out the usage patterns of OSN among youths and the impact OSN has on them. A survey was carried out targeting a population of mostly teenagers at the secondary level education in Mauritius, aged between 12 and 18. It consisted both of hard-copy and online questionnaires with primarily close-ended questions. However, due to low response rate and the inability to control for multiple responses for the online, web-based questionnaires, only the paper-based questionnaires where eventually used. Colleges were randomly identified based on them being located either in urban or rural areas (see Target Population and Sampling section below) and a research assistant was dispatched to oversee the survey with the collaboration of teachers. This resulted in a very high response rate among the targeted population and ensured that responses are unique as each student obtains only one questionnaire to fill in. 3.1 Target Population and Sampling The survey population included all 80,000 secondary students in Mauritius from 200 colleges. Due to the large size of the targeted population, sampling was carried out so as an observational study could be performed. In this study, a simple random sampling has been used where a sample is selected for study from a larger group (a population). Each individual is chosen entirely by chance and each member of the population has an equal chance of being included in the sample. For this study, a random sample of 5% of the total population will be taken. Since Mauritius is geographically small, we have sub-divided the sample into smaller sub-samples of around 2.5% each; the first sub-sample targeted students attending colleges in located in rural areas and the other one, for colleges located in urban areas. Comparing the results obtained from the two sub-samples, it was noticed that both samples yielded the same outcome and were therefore combined for analysis. The survey lasted for about two months in 2011. A total of 4545 responses were collected. The Electronic Journal of Information Systems in Developing Countries www.ejisdc.org

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4. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION As described in the previous section, a total of 4545 participants responded to the survey. 39.7% of the survey respondents were males (n=1803) and 60.3% were female (n=2739) as shown in. It should be noted that three (3) respondents chose not to reveal their gender. It was observed that gender does have an impact in the use of OSNs by teenagers, with more males (91.1%) declaring that they are members of OSNs than females (82.4%), see Table 1. The possibility that males who are not members did not participate in the survey was considered and it was found that the approach taken for administering the survey ensured a negligible non-response rate among the students in the sampling. Gender of Respondents Male Female Respondents Region Urban Rural

91.1% 82.4% 87.1% 84% Members 17.6% 13% 16% Non-Members 8.9% Table 1. Percentage OSN Membership by Gender and Region On the other hand, it was found that the regions where young people live did not have a great influence on the use of OSN sites as Table 1 depicts clearly that 87.1% of OSN users reside in urban areas while 84% live in rural areas. This re-enforces the vision of the Mauritian Governments drive to democratise access to the Internet, which in turn is enabling these youngsters to join OSNs. An important observation is that most of the Mauritian youths are members of at least one OSN site, with 85.9% of them stating that they are members of an OSN site. Such a high penetration rate highlights the now deeply anchored culture of cyber-socialisation in the younger generations in Mauritius. According to the survey results (Table 2.), in Mauritius, the most popular OSN site is Facebook with 97.9% of the respondents being a member. The second most visited OSN site is Twitter followed by Google+, having 20.8% and 20% of the survey population respectively. The popularity of Facebook is not surprising since, worldwide, it is already the leading OSN site boasting more than 845 million monthly active users by the end of the year 2011 according to its news page (Facebook Newsroom, 2012). OSN Site % OSN Site % OSN Site % OSN Site % Facebook 97.9 MySpace 11.5 SecondLife 2 Others 0.8 Twitter 20.8 Tagged 6.1 Orkut 1.5 Google+ 20 Flickr 3.3 LinkedIn 1.4 Hi5 16.9 Friendster 3 Ning 1.3 Table 2: OSN Sites Membership Percentage Among Mauritian Youths Using OSNs More than half of the teenage respondents, 52%, indicated that they access their preferred OSN sites on a daily basis while 35% access these sites weekly. Others access the sites around twice monthly (6%) and once a month (7%). OSN users usually gain access to such sites from a number of places and often, from multiple place. Therefore, respondents were allowed to provide more than one answer. Most youngsters use their personal computer at home to access their OSN accounts (87.5%) while a large number use their personal mobile phones for such activities (42.8%). Only a few The Electronic Journal of Information Systems in Developing Countries www.ejisdc.org

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respondents were accessing OSNs from their schools (3%). A notable 21.1% accesses were made from public places such as Post Office, Community Centres and Municipalities. It was also observed that most youngsters were persuaded to join these sites mostly through peer pressure, with 43.3% of respondents mentioning that it was their friends who introduced them to OSNs. Siblings amounted to 26.3% while the percentage for other relatives was 22.1%. As for parents, in only 7% of cases they influenced their children to join OSN sites. A negligible 1.3%, which included teachers and other people, encouraged youngsters to make use of OSN. Most of the youngsters are posting personal information such as birth date (84.3%), gender (86.4%), photo (68.8%), school (62.9%), activities (69.6%), interests (71.2%) and address (42.4%). Other information, they shared were mostly relationship status and religion (0.6%). The majority of the respondents stated that they share the above information on their OSN profiles. However, many of them also stated that they set their profiles to private so that only the users to which they are connected, who are also known as their friends, can view the information they share or post. It was seen that female teenagers (83.0%) were more likely to have their profiles set to private than males (68.2%). Teens have a myriad of reasons to use OSN sites. In this survey, it was found that for a large number of youngsters, OSN sites allow them to keep in touch with their friends and family (88.3%). OSN chat facilities are also used for interaction with connected friends (86.4%). Other purposes for which they use OSN were: to meet new people, that is making new friends (54.8%), to play games (50.8%) and to share photos, videos and music with their friends (52.8%). Moreover, it has been noticed that 39% of the respondents use OSNs to discuss school work. These statistics can be compared to the survey carried out in the US by Pew Internet (Lenhart & Madden, 2007) where it is stated, Most teens are using the networks to stay in touch with people they already know, either friends that they see a lot (91% of social networking teens have done this). 49% of social network users say they use the networks to make new friends. From the survey results, it is found that OSNs have a great impact on social relationships. In order to gauge the surveys participants perception about the effects that the use of OSNs has on them, some of the main impact factors derived from our initial pilot survey were used in the questionnaire. These factors were from both negative and positive categories. Respondents were allowed to provide multiple answers, that is, for example, someone could indicate that OSN help him/her in a positive way but at the same time affect him/her negatively; therefore, overlapping of answers is possible. This can be been in the case of maintain relationships and that of communicate with friends; where the former pertains mainly to family members, siblings and couples while the latter refers to casual communication through facilities offered by OSNs between friends. A large proportion of respondents (77.8%) felt that OSNs help them to communicate with their friends more easily while 67.8% stating that OSNs allow them to maintain relationships and make new friends. It is also noticed that some 28.9% of the respondents found that OSNs help them in their studies. On the other hand, a smaller portion of the survey population stated that OSN sites have a negative impact on them. Some 27.7% of the respondents indicated that they waste too much time on OSNs while 19.1% said that OSNs interfere with their school work. When asked about negative experiences encountered through OSNs, it was found that 63.4% of the teenagers expressed that they had at least one unpleasant experience. Figure 9 gives more details on the different types of negative experiences. The majority of the respondents stated that they have had conversations with people using bad languages (53.5%). Some said that they were being bullied by strangers repeatedly (46.5%). While The Electronic Journal of Information Systems in Developing Countries www.ejisdc.org

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33.4% acknowledged that people spied on their online activities and 15.7% were sent inappropriate pictures and videos. Some 11.5% of the teens stated that they were threatened by people online and finally, 2.0% said that their accounts were hacked or were affected by viruses and spams. Given that the media has focussed a lot on the dangers of OSNs, parents have become more conscious about the OSN accounts of their children. It was found that 30% of the respondents parents have an OSN account while 13.9% of the respondents stated that their parents know their OSNs passwords. Some 31.2% of the respondents indicated that their parents monitor their OSN activities while 41.2% of the respondents said their parents do not give them the permission to share their personal information on their profiles. As shown in Figure 5, data from several categories of personal information were shared by the respondents despite their parents disapproval. This is an aspect that will need to be further explored in future studies. On the other hand, it can be observed that there is a growing concern on the parts of parents about privacy issues of their children regarding their OSN profiles. 5. CONCLUSION The purpose of this research work was to examine the OSNs usage patterns of Mauritian teenagers and the impact of OSNs on their lives and behaviour. It is found that OSNs are very popular among the Mauritian youths with the majority of them stating that they are active members of social networks. The current study, which is the first of its kind in Mauritius, has shed light on the evolving nature of OSNs among adolescents illustrating the reasons why they use OSNs, what information they share and the negative impact of OSNs on them. The findings from this study can be used for further research works on OSNs and its impact on interpersonal relationship among youngsters, culture, and education. 6. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This research has been funded by the Mauritius Research Council under the Unsolicited Research Grant Scheme. We thank the Mauritius Research Council for the funding. We would also like to thank the Ministry of Education for its support to conduct the survey and experiments. 7. REFERENCES Boyd, D. (2007) Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Learning - Youth, Identity, and Digital Media Volume (ed. David Buckingham). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 119-142. Facebook Newsroom (2012) Fact Sheet Statistics. http://newsroom.fb.com/content/default.aspx?NewsAreaId=22. Housing and Population Census (2011) Volume I: Housing and Living Conditions, November 2011. http://statsmauritius.gov.mu/English/Documents/ publications/Housing/economics%20and%20social%20indicators/reports/vol1.pdf ICT Indicators Portal http://www.gov.mu/portal/sites/indicators/ICT_Infras_Readiness/ internetsubs.html Larsen, M.C. & Ryberg, T. (2011) Youth and Online Social Networking: From Local Experiences to Public Discourses. Youth Culture and Net Culture: Online Social Practices. IGI Global. 17-40. Larsen, M.C. (2007) Understanding Social Networking: On Young Peoples Construction and Co-construction of Identity Online. Internet Research 8.0: Lets Play, Association of Internet Researchers, Vancouver. The Electronic Journal of Information Systems in Developing Countries www.ejisdc.org

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Lenhart, A. & Madden, M. (2007) Teens, Privacy, & Online Social Networks. Pew Internet and American Life Project Report. http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2007/TeensPrivacy-and-Online-Social-Networks/1-Summary-of-Findings.aspx. Mathews, R. & Cameron, F. (2010) The Social and Psychological Impact of Online Social Networking. APS National Psychology Week Survey http://www.psychology.org.au/ publications/inpsych/2010/december/social/. Population and Vital Statistics (2011) http://statsmauritius.gov.mu/English/Pages/ Population%20and%20Vital%20Statistics-%20Year%202011.htm Tynes, B. (2006) Internet Safety Gone Wild? Sacrificing the Educational and Psychosocial Benefits of Online Social Environments, Journal of Adolescent Research, 22, 6, 575584.

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