Applying the SOBC paradigm to explain how social media overload affects academic performance
Introduction
The use of social media is pervasive across the globe with Facebook alone having 2.7 billion monthly users (Statista, 2019). While social media undoubtedly provides many advantages to users, researchers are now more closely scrutinizing the problematic use of platforms such as Facebook. At the individual level, fatigue (Bright, Kleiser, & Grau, 2015; Lee, Son, & Kim, 2016; Maier, Laumer, Weinert, & Weitzel, 2015; Zhang, Zhao, Lu, & Yang, 2016), depression (Brooks & Longstreet, 2015; Elhai, Levine, Dvorak, & Hall, 2016), narcissism (Brailovskaia & Margraf, 2016), stress (Maier et al., 2015), and decreased performance (Brooks, 2015; Turel & Qahri-Saremi, 2016) are some of the problems associated with social media use. Due to their intense usage of and limited external control over their Internet use, extensive free time, and flexible schedules, university students are more disposed than others to develop problematic social media use (Turel & Qahri-Saremi, 2016). In this paper, we investigate the etiology and consequences of social media overload among university students, the phenomenon in which the extensive adoption and use of social media has exposed people to a massive amount of information and communication demands that may require energy and cognitive processing beyond their capabilities (Lee et al., 2016).
The context of our study is the general use of social media by university students. While some studies report on how social media enriches classroom collaboration and encourage its use in higher learning environments (Al-Rahmi, Alias, Othman, Marin, & Tur, 2018), the majority of prior research has established the detrimental impact of social media use on students’ academic performance (Datu, Yang, Valdez, & Chu, 2018; Junco, 2012b; Kirschner & Karpinski, 2010; Turel & Qahri-Saremi, 2016). For instance, some studies report on the negative relationship between social media use and engagement among students (Datu et al., 2018; Junco, 2012a). Time spent on social media has been found to be a significant predictor: Facebook users dedicate more time to the platform and less on their studies, resulting in lower grades (Junco, 2012b; Kirschner & Karpinski, 2010). Using time diaries and sensor data, Giunchiglia, Zeni, Gobbi, Bignotti, and Bison (2018) confirmed that the duration of usage and frequency of checking social media apps negatively affected students' academic performance. Likewise, the multitasking behaviors afforded by social media are linked to poor academic performance (le Roux & Parry, 2017; Junco & Cotten, 2012) and well-being (Becker, Alzahabi, & Hopwood, 2013) among students. While high usage of social media may not in itself be problematic (Turel & Serenko, 2012), it can cause strain in students which impacts their performance (Cao, Masood, Luqman, & Ali, 2018).
High use of social media itself may become problematic when the users feel overloaded by it. We conceptualize social media overload using two dimensions: information overload and communication overload. Very few prior research studies investigated the antecedents of information and communication overload in the social media context (Lee et al., 2016). Those that do have either focused on demographic and usage characteristics (Maier, Laumer, Eckhardt, & Weitzel, 2014), or system and information characteristics (Cho, Ramgolam, Schaefer, & Sandlin, 2011; Lee et al., 2016). Likewise, while the damaging influence of social media use on academic performance is clear, very few existing studies are underpinned by a solid theoretical mechanism to justify how social media may affect students' performance. We extend the existing knowledge base by applying the situation–organism–behavior-consequence (SOBC) paradigm (Davis & Luthans, 1980) to explain how the cognitive psychological condition ‘fear of missing out’ (the situation) leads to perceptions of social media overload (the organism), and how the subsequent deficient self-regulation (the behavior) results in impaired academic performance (the consequence).
By investigating the SOBC interdependencies, this study makes important contributions. Firstly, feelings of social media overload are not pleasant and can be debilitating. By focusing on the psychological and behavioral inhibitors of students’ academic performance, our study can lead to development of expedient and targeted interventions rather than shallow technological solutions such as restricting social media access. Secondly, our study demonstrates the efficacy of the SOBC model in explaining problematic IT usage. Thirdly, this study supports the mediating role of self-regulation on the relationship between communication overload and academic performance. Overall, this study yields an enriched explanation and prediction of how and why the problems associated with social media use lead to poor academic performance.
Section snippets
SOBC model
Stemming from social learning theory, the SOBC model states that the various aspects of the environmental situation (S) affect the internal states of people or the organism (O), which in turn, drive their behavioral responses (B) and the contingent consequences (C) which result. Initially proposed by Davis and Luthans (1980), the SOBC model is a more complex mechanism of human behavior which modifies and extends the SOR (stimulus-organism-response) (Mehrabian & Russell, 1974) and ABC
Research model development
This section explains how the constructs we studied were chosen and aligned to the SOBC paradigm. We used an integrated research approach that includes both qualitative and quantitative data. Qualitative interview data were firstly collected from 12 students of an Irish university in order to shed light on the causes and consequences of social media overload. Following best practice in conducting interviews to inform the design of a quantitative study (Bryman & Bell, 2011), a semi-structured
Data collection
Following the qualitative study, quantitative data were collected from business students from one university each in Ireland (42%), the US (32%), and Finland (26%), using an online survey. A total of 567 students were contacted to complete the survey with 182 useable responses received (32% response rate). Participants who successfully completed the survey were entered into a draw to win one of four $25 Amazon vouchers. Approximately 52% of the respondents were male. 79% respondents were
Results
The test of the structural model includes estimates of the path coefficients, which indicate the strengths of the relationships between the dependent and independent variables, and the R2 values, which represent the amount of variance explained in the dependent variables. Fig. 3 shows the results of the structural model test.
FoMO had a significant influence on communication overload and information overload, supporting H1 and H2 (H1: β = 0.484, p < 0.001; H2: β = 0.379, p < 0.001). As
Discussion and implications
Internet technology is omnipresent in our lives. With their flexible schedules, significant free time, and still developing self-control, students are susceptible to the maladaptive influences of the Internet, and especially social media. Recent research has observed the deleterious effects of social media overload (Bright et al., 2015; Dhir et al., 2018; Lutz, Ranzini, & Meckel, 2014; Maier et al., 2014), but has not offered theoretical explanations of how and why social media overload leads
Acknowledgements
This research was conducted with the support of a grant from the Irish Research Council.
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