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.