Usage of Facebook by University Students in Romania and Lithuania: A Comparative Study

Abstract

Facebook is a social networking website which gained a huge popularity in the last decade among university students. Recent papers show that Facebook favors meeting new people, staying in touch with friends, getting useful information and knowledge, sharing of documents, joining groups and participating in group discussions. Although the usage of social networking websites in general and Facebook in particular has been extensively studied, this is little data available regarding the variations across countries, towns, and gender. This paper aims to comparatively analyze the results of two studies carried on in Lithuania and Romania. The data show that the reasons why university students are using Facebook differ from country to country and from town to town. Female university students have larger Facebook networks and spend more time on Facebook than male university students.Keywords: Facebook, Social Networking Websites, University Students, Comparative Study.1 IntroductionPlatforms supporting social networking on the Internet are applications for the creation, sharing and exchange of user-generated content that manifests in various forms: forums, blogs, instant messaging, collaborative projects, and virtual communities. Facebook (FB) is a social networking website that has an explosive growth in the last years and an increased popularity among university students [2, 17].The shift of paradigm towards social learning brings in front various activities such as meeting, active participation, critical thinking, information and content sharing, collaboration, and debate. Last but not least, Facebook is favoring the offline university education of students [4, 5, 14, 16, 13].The usage of social networking websites in general [18, 3, 10] and Facebook, in particular [17, 16] has been extensively studied. However, there is still little data available regarding the variations across countries, towns, faculty profile, and gender. Understanding how university students are using Facebook is important in order to exploit the potential benefits of social networking for the university life.In order to explore the use of Facebook by university people, Lamanauskas et al. [11] carried on a qualitative study based on two focus groups in Siauliai University, Lithuania. Their findings show that Facebook is useful for individual and educational institution image and the formation of groups. In this moment, the educational possibilities are still not sufficiently used / revealed, so more investigations are needed in this area.Iordache [8] carried on a similar study in Romania based on structured interview. His findings show that Facebook is easy to use and enables students to express themselves freely. According to students' perceptions, Facebook is useful for keeping in touch with people from home, facilitating of interactive activities, sharing of teaching and grouprelated materials, and formation of new groups.Based on the results of previous work and these two qualitative studies a new evaluation instrument was developed in order to better understand why and how university students are using Facebook and which are the educational benefits of this social networking website [15].This paper aims at comparatively presenting the results of two studies carried on in Lithu- ania and Romania based on the same evaluation instrument that was administrated in December 2014, respectively January 2015.The main research questions of this study are:· Why are university students using Facebook and how much is the usage related to the university context?· How large is the network size of university students and how many Facebook friends are students?· How often are university students logging on Facebook and how much time do they spend?· How does usage vary across countries, towns, and gender?2 Method and Empirical Studies2.1 Method and Data SampleThe questionnaire was administrated to university students from three towns: Siauliai, Vilnius, and Bucharest. …