Habits of access and addiction to virtual social networks in secondary school students of Educational Units of Sucre

Abstract

The research sought to determine components that make daily access to connection and addictive behaviors exposed to virtual social networks, that is, by analyzing two variables present in high school students from educational units in the city of Sucre who were in fourth to sixth year of high school. Descriptive cross-sectional study, where the observation units were a total of 536 students belonging to four Educational Units, two Fiscal and two Private, groups made up of 340 men and 196 women, with a fluctuating age between 14 to 19 years representing 99.8% and only a student of 23 years. The evaluation of the variables under study: access habits to virtual social networks (VSN) considered: the availability, participation and preference distributed in a questionnaire of 12 questions, for the data collection of the variable addiction to virtual social networks, the following were used: a a validated questionnaire, presented by Escurra Mayaute & Salas Blas, aimed at assessing Addiction to Social Networks (ASN), which addresses in its structure the following factors: obsession, lack of personal control and excessive use of VSN, an instrument that has been conditioned In its items to the context and characteristics of the student, in the reliability assessment of Cronbach's alpha, it reached a score of 0.928. The general results, in relation to access habits, reflected that 100% of the students access the internet and have a virtual social network account, preferably WhatsApp followed by Facebook, in the same way the use and application made by the teachers to communicate with their students is between 82 to 90% in the teaching process. In relation to the addiction variable valued by a questionnaire (VSN) and validated, according to the Likert scale, a trend of Little level was observed with 42.5%, followed by Quite a bit with 39.7% that shows the need to consider it as a problem for students and only 5.6% have a high degree of addiction. Considering the average results on a scale (1 to 4) of each factor express predominance of lack of control with a score of 2.5892, followed by excessive use approximately 2.4894 and to a lesser degree obsession, making a global analysis there is a certain tendency to convert VSN in an addition, due to lack of personal control or awareness.