Relationship between social support and social connection in the use of social media by UTAR students in Sungai Long campus

The amount of time spent on social media by students is relatively higher as technology has become part of their essentials for social interaction. Social connection is important for university students to build and maintain social ties. The research objective of this paper aims to identify how soci...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Choong, Xin Yee
Format: Final Year Project / Dissertation / Thesis
Published: 2023
Subjects:
Online Access:http://eprints.utar.edu.my/6272/
http://eprints.utar.edu.my/6272/1/FYP2_Choong_Xin_Yee_Final_Submission.pdf
Description
Summary:The amount of time spent on social media by students is relatively higher as technology has become part of their essentials for social interaction. Social connection is important for university students to build and maintain social ties. The research objective of this paper aims to identify how social support influences social connection in the use of social media by the students in UTAR, Sungai Long Campus. This research focuses on the relationship among the main aspects of social connection, social support and usage of social media, in particular to identify how social connection is affected when social support happens in social media in a symbolic interactionism analysis. Thus, to address the research objective, quantitative research was employed by distributing online survey questionnaires to the targeted participants and the data collected is analysed using descriptive analytics. The results presented that with the explanation of symbolic interactionism theory, individuals evaluate social support as the reaction of others, and have developed a positive self-concept leading to enhancement of social connection. However, the findings also suggested social support does influence the social connection in the use of social media, but not strongly influenced as there are neutral findings in a few statements. Therefore, the main research findings highlighted that there is a slight positive relationship between social support and social connection in the use of social media.