CC BY
61
Section 1. Psychotechnology
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.20534/EJLL-17-1-42-45
Shok Hong Ooi, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Master in psychology, the School of Social Science E-mail: s.hong-89@hotmail.com
Social support over Facebook as predictor of life satisfaction among Malaysian University students
Abstract: Many young people interact and thus receive and communicate social support over the online world, particularly through Facebook. This paper focuses on how Malaysian university students perceived social support over Facebook. More specifically, this study focuses on how perceived social support influence university students' life satisfaction. Participants were 800 university students from southern of Malaysia (178 male and 622 female). The finding showed that social support is related to university students' life satisfaction. There is a positive correlation between perceived social support and life satisfaction. In conclusion, perceived social support over social media such as Facebook are important elements of social relationships for university students in determining their life satisfaction.
Keywords: Social support, life satisfaction, Facebook.
decline in their life satisfaction levels. However, another research showed that Facebook usage such as posting and chatting have positive association with life satisfaction [24, 10].
Introduction
Facebook has been rated as one of the most popular social networking sites (SNS). Facebook has 1.44 billion of active users in this world [1, 8]. Social media such as Facebook enable individuals to create a public profile that can connect with other users within a fingertip [2, 8]. This has caused the traditional face to face communication to give a way to online interaction. For youngster, the purpose of Facebook is interpersonal communication as they prefer to communicate by using social networking sites [10, 9]. Social support has been identified as the important elements in a relationship [18, 10]. However, with the existence of social media usage, there is little understanding of the online social support.
Besides, the impact of offline positive relationships on overall life satisfaction is well-established [17, 10; 9,9]. However, previous studies on online relationships had shown a contradicting result between the Facebook usage and life satisfaction. There was a research showing that Facebook usage has negative shifts on users' subjective well-being over time [8, 9]. The higher intensity of Facebook usage among the adolescences, the worse they feel after using the Facebook and the more
Moreover, previous research focused on frequency use of social networking sites on relationships rather than specific element that influence their life satisfaction [4, 8]. This study has identified the element of social support as a factor influence on life satisfaction. The impact of support over Facebook towards the overall satisfaction with university students' life is the focus of the present research. Therefore, this study investigates the relationships between the social support towards the students' life satisfaction.
Social support and life satisfaction
Computer mediator social support has become very common across the internet today [23, 10]. Facebook users experience higher level of social support as compared with other internet users [7, 9]. This is because Facebook has become additional platform for adolescent to look for social support and Generation Z prefer social support from online social network as they were born with advancement of technology.
College students have higher proportions of maintained connection in Facebook as they perceived Facebook as the usefulness tools for procuring social support [13, 9]. This is because Facebook's features offer users a unique context for seeking social support. Face-book features such as status updates, share link or instant messaging, facilitate the sharing of social support needs. These features offer social support seekers the possibility to interact with numerous friends and family members at once and get wider range of diverse feedback.
Social bonds and supportive relationships are important to a person's health and well-being [9, 9]. There was a research conducted on social support and well-being. The results showed that social support has direct effect to well-being. Social support provided by large social networks enables an individual to have regular positive experience and stable socially rewarded roles in community. Positive experience through social support enhanced an individual life satisfaction.
In this study, social support has been differentiated to three sources such as family, friends and significant other [21,10]. Sources of social support from online network has become a question as Facebook has introduced a feature which enables users to group different categories of relationships such as acquaintances, best friends, co-workers, romantic partners, and family members in a group which classified as "friends" [20, 10]. A study found that university students perceived social support from significant others, followed by friends and family members [16, 10]. Social support from family and other sources are associated with positive emotion in adolescence [12, 9]. Social support influences an individual emotion and indirectly affecting the evaluation towards their life [14, 9].
Social supports from family and friends are both positively associated with life satisfaction [19, 10]. Friends' support for college students is very important, as students first time stay away from their family members and shifting their support toward peer. Close friend's support increases positive emotion among college students [6, 8]. This is because there is a difference between general friends and close friend where close friend is more influential in college student than general friends. Therefore, close friend's support can increase college student's positive emotion and life satisfaction.
However, past research had shown that social support through Facebook may not necessarily has positive effects on adolescents' life-satisfaction. This may due to the characteristics of SNS such as reduction in contextual, visual and auditory cues, and an almost entire
elimination of non-verbal cues [22, 10]. Therefore, this research studies the relationships between social support and life satisfaction among Malaysian university students.
Method
Participants
The surveys were completed by 800 participants who were undergraduate students at a local university in southern of Malaysia. The participants in this study were not evenly distributed by gender and races. There were more women in this study which consists of622 women and only have 178 men. Besides this, there were more malay students in this study which consists of440 Malay, 295 Chinese, 39 Indian and 26 other races. This reflect the pattern of general population in Malaysia and distribution of university students.
Procedure
University wide courses was identified and the lecturer in charge was approached. The selected course was opened for all students from different academic programs and years in the university. Once the course has been identified and lecturer has approved, students will be invited to participate the survey through e-learning. The link to the survey will be posted on the e-learning or class's page through Facebook where users can access the general information about the research study stated at the Google Forms. Students must answer the survey online (Google forms) within the time frame given to them.
Measures
The dependent variable of life satisfaction was measured by five items adopted from previous research as it has adopted in Facebook setting [10, 9]. The purpose of this scale was measured the global life satisfaction of an individual. The participants were instructed to specify their agreement by indicating an appropriate number on each item that based on seven Likert scale ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree). SWLS had a good reliability (correlation coefficient =.82 and coefficient alpha =.87) [3, 8]. The reliability for this scale was very high (Cronbach's a = 0.833, mean= 23.47, SD= 5.05).
Social support was measured by Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support (MSPSS). This scale consists of 12 items adapted from previous research [5, 8]. The purpose of using this scale was it measure the social support from all sources rather than from a person. Each item was measured by a five-point Likert-type scale (1= strongly disagree and 5 = strongly agree). In this study, MSPSS has a good reliability (Cronbach's a = 0.92, mean= 45.92, SD= 8.53).
Results
This research measures the level of social support and life satisfaction. The mean of social support was 3.82, which lies between the scales "Neither disagree nor agree" to "Agree", and it is very close to "Agree". This number indicates that the samples in the present study perceived high level of social support in Facebook. For the sources of social support, participants rate highest on family members (mean=4.0) which lies in "Agree", following by friends (mean= 3.8) and significant others (mean= 3.69) which lies between the scales "Neither disagree nor agree" to "Agree", and it is very close to "Agree". This number indicates that the samples in the present study perceived high level of social support from family members, friends and significant other. Lastly, the mean of life satisfaction is 4.69, which lies in between the scales "neither agree nor disagree" to "slightly agree", and it is much closer to "slightly agree". This implies the sample in the present study is slightly satisfied with their life.
In this study, correlation is used to analyse the relationships between the perceived social support towards the university students' life satisfaction. The result of Pearson Correlation showed that there is a significant positive correlation between social support and life satisfaction (r =.504, N = 800, p <.001, one-tailed). This result showed a moderate correlation. Positive relationships showed that the higher social support an individual scored on multidimensional support scale, the higher his or her life satisfaction.
A simple multiple regression has been run on sources of social support and life satisfaction to get a detailed result for sources of social support. A significant model emerged by utilising stepwise method: F (3, 796)= =94.31, p <.0005. The model explains 26.0% of the variance in positive emotion (Adjusted R2 =.260). Social support from significant others, friend and family can positively predict one's life satisfaction.
Discussion
The finding of the study indicates a high level of social support over Facebook at Malaysia university students. This is consistent with the general findings which indicate the Facebook as an important source of social support and the youth are more likely to get higher social support through Facebook [7,9]. This is especially true for college student as nowadays the college students are born with the advancement of technology and more familiar with the social networking sites. Therefore, they visit the website once they need support from someone. Another explanation for high level of social support in Facebook is the Facebook carrying a function
of support from different features such as status updated, shared post and instant messaging that make support communication easy to be extended [13, 9]. This is indeed as demonstrated by the findings in this study. Previous research which was conducted on non-Asian sample and had shown the similar result as the present study [15, 9]. This indicates that the universal function of Facebook as providing support across different culture and society.
This study differentiates between different sources of social support. It was found that the samples perceived most of the support come from family members, followed by friends and significant others. This finding was contradicting with the previous research which the participants rated highest on significant other, followed by friends and family members [16, 10]. The differences may be due to the location of research where previous study was carried out in America and the present study was carried out in Asian. Asian people practice collectiv-istic culture so they perceive higher social support from family members. However, America people practice individualistic culture where they value more on themselves, therefore they perceive higher social support from significant others. Besides this, both researches showed that the university students perceived friends as second sources of their social support. The possible reason is university students are away from their house and stay in a hostel with their friends so they tend to look for friend when the primary social support is not available.
The findings of this study showed that there is a positive significant relationship between social support and life satisfaction. This finding was similar as the previous study as it stated that perceived social support has direct effect towards life satisfaction [14, 9].The possible reason is that the social support which come from someone can reduce the university students' negative emotion such as depression and therefore increase their life satisfaction. This is because university students can share their problem and get encouragement from someone, thus it increases their life satisfaction. Another possible reason for the similar finding is both studies were carried out in Asian country which has the almost similar culture therefore it does not have much differences on the findings.
Lastly, the limitation for this study is the focus at students in university only. Future studies should include other groups of population including young people who are not in the university. University students sample limits the ability of the study generalization to the young adulthood which is between 18-29 age group. Besides this, most of the university students come from
the middle and upper-middle classes, which can access continue to diffuse into the world, therefore this study
to internet and have more time to socialize with people. captures a snapshot of social support in Facebook to in-
Therefore, it is important to include other group ofpopu- crease the understanding towards the interaction in
lations such as lower class people who also have ability Facebook. to access to the internet and Facebook. As technologies
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