Social Media Usage and Sleep Quality Among Freshmen College Students in the New Normal

Abstract

The disruption of sleeping hours brought by different diversions such as social media during the pandemic create a wreaked havoc to the sleep quality among the freshmen students. Despite of this, little attention was given to the impact of social media usage to the freshmen’s sleep quality. This study sought to establish the relationship between the social media usage and sleep quality of freshmen college students. The study used descriptive-correlational method with 385 freshmen students as respondents across the higher educational institutions in the Philippines for the academic year 2021-2022 through simple random sampling. The researchers utilized the Social Media Addiction Scale (SMAS) and the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI) in order to elicit the data from the respondents. Google Forms and Facebook application were used to administer the instruments. To understand the relationship between social media usage and sleep quality, the null hypothesis was tested at 0.01 alpha level of significance. Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient indicated that there is a significant relationship between the variables with the r-value of 2.83 which suggest a strong positive correlation. It can be deduced that social media usage affects the sleep quality of the freshmen college students. This study recommends to have a mechanism to regulate the usage of social media as this can be detrimental to the college students when taken for granted.