How Students Use Facebook

In this paper I investigate the way in which first year students in the Department of Media, Information and Communication at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, use Facebook. I provide an overview of recent studies on Facebook usage and present the results of a survey (in the form of an online questionnaire) on the Facebook activities of 618 students (78.6 % of all first year students) in this department. Previous studies identified four major Facebook activities: 1) information sharing (receiving/providing information and generating ideas), 2) sharing for educational purposes (for learning, problem solving and sharing work), 3) social purposes (retrieving personal information about others or themselves, chatting, making appointments and generally keeping in touch) and 4) leisure (gaming and relaxing). The questionnaire’s answers were grouped accordingly and then compared, to provide a better understanding of how students use Facebook. In addition, a range of variables were measured in the survey,in order to map student characteristics such as gender, age, place of birth, living arrangements and the socio-economic status of their parents. Those variables werecompared with the Facebook activities using PAWS Statistics 18.0 (formally SPSS) to determine any correlation.