The Influence of Social Media Usage on Adolescents’ Identity Status and Academic Achievement: The Case of Woldia High School Students, North Wollo of Amhara Regional State

Abstract

The major purpose of the study was to investigate the influence of social media usage on adolescents’ identity status and academic achievement among school adolescents. Correlational research design was used to address the core objective of the study. A total of 264 grade 10th students (124 male and 140 female) were randomly selected. Descriptive statistics and Pearson correlation were employed to describe data and to analyze relationships among variables respectively while multiple regressions was employed to determine whether sex, age and social media predict academic achievement or not. As a result, the variable sex, age and face book usage found significantly predict academic achievement by about 8.2% (R2 =8.2%, F =7.09 p<0.05). Further, the study found that there were positively significant relationship among face book usage and adolescents’ identity status. Therefore, the computed Pearson correlation identified that moratorium identity status of the students correlated with facebook usage with r = .434 at p < .05; identity diffusion correlated with face book usage with r=.354 at p <0.05. Contrary to this, the computed Pearson correlation found negatively significant relationship between face book usage and identity achievement with r = -.104 at p = < 0.05), and between face book and identity foreclosure with r = - 0.89 at p < 0.05). In generally speaking, this study summarized that more than 70% of the adolescents in the study area are facebook users and most of them averagely use about 45 minutes to visit their facebook account per day while their facebook usage has direct relationship with their identity status. Based, on the findings, therefore, it was concluded that social media has both negative and positive influence on the identity status of adolescent and predicts adolescent’s CGPA. Hence, stakeholders’ due attention is highly needed to monitor the problem and create the way adolescents invest their time for their academic activities instead.