Uses of Facebook and academic procrastination in general studies students at a Peruvian university

Abstract

The incidence of consumption on Facebook around the world and its implications for university students is something that has necessarily been studied in the scientific literature (Gil et al., 2019). Fewer and far between are works focused on the study of social networks and academic procrastination in a population, particularly with a non-traditional teaching methodology (General Studies), even though this knowledge would allow us to obtain a profile of university students and identify their possible actions that could derive in academic problems. As a matter of fact, its importance has enabled the present study to analyze the relationship between the motivations for using Facebook and academic procrastination, and consequently determine the resulting correlation with certain indicators of use, satisfaction with Facebook and academic procrastination. For this purpose, the Facebook Usage Questionnaire was used (Igartua & Rodríguez de Dios, 2016), in addition to the Academic Procrastination Scale (Domínguez-Lara et al., 2014), with a sample of 150 students in their first year at a public university. In this manner, the results agree, showing a clear relationship between the motivations of “entertainment” and “virtual community” with moderate levels of procrastination, corresponding to greater implication with this social network. Significant differences in terms of gender and age are shown, which allows for a better understanding of the behavior pattern of these variables.