Vocational School Students’ Purposes of Facebook Usage

The study investigated vocational school students’ purposes of Facebook usage and examined how some demographic profile, including gender frequency of Facebook usage and network size on Facebook have played a role in their purposes of Facebook usage. For the purpose, the researcher used a questionnaire that was completed by a sample of students at the Erzurum Vocational School, Ataturk University. The first section of the questionnaire consists of students’ demographic profile. The second section of the questionnaire included "Purposes of Facebook Usage Scale" developed Mazman (2009). This scale consists of 11 items with 3 factors as “social relations” (7 items), “work related” (2 items) and “daily activities” (2 items). Results indicated that social relations are the main reason why vocational school students use Facebook. It is used for communication, sharing news and pictures and meeting new people rather than worked related purposes. It is also found that statistically significant differences in purposes of Facebook usage based on gender. According to the results, females performed better on work related factor and males performed better on social relations and daily activities factors.

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