Students’ Social Apathy in Real and Virtual Worlds: A Comparative Study

Abstract

In recent years, social apathy has been able to attract the attention of sociologists and social psychologists. Thus, the present study addresses the issue of social apathy in the real and virtual worlds. This research, which consists of a social survey, was conducted in spring 2019 in Kashan, among which 384 students of Payame Noor University, Medical Sciences University, and the State University of Kashan, were selected via a non-proportional classified sampling method. The results showed that, in general, the degree of social apathy of students in both real and virtual environments is a little more than the middle, although its amount in the real spaces is slightly higher than virtual ones. It also became clear that there is a correlation between the degree of social apathy of students in the real world and the virtual worlds, but the degree of this apathy in the real or virtual world did not differ significantly in terms of the field of study, type of university, residence and income. In other words, the degree of social apathy was relatively the same in all the mentioned groups of students. Keywords: social apathy, virtual world, students, information-communication technology