WhatsApp use and student's psychological well-being: Role of social capital and social integration
Introduction
In the current environment of saturated online media, the rapid development of social networking sites has transformed the social interaction and online behavior of individuals (Vromen, Xenos, & Loader, 2015). The adoption of social media enables people to instantly create profiles, accumulate friends in life, and participate in computer-based communications by transmitting, publishing, and commenting on different information (Ali, Wang, & Khan, 2019; Lee, Chung, & Park, 2018; Pang, 2017). Members from different social, cultural, and geographical regions currently use social media applications in a variety of ways to meet different individual needs (Ali, Wang, Khan, Pitafi, & Amin, 2019; Gil de Zúñiga, Jung, & Valenzuela, 2012). The use of social media by the younger generation has led to a range of psychological and social consequences, including increased satisfaction with university life, increased participation, and maintaining social relationships (Zhan, Sun, Wang, & Zhang, 2016). On the other hand, excessive use of social media also has negative consequences such as stress, exhaustion and information overload (Tussyadiah & Zach, 2013). However, the positive and negative aspects of social networks have not changed the fact that these tools are rapidly gaining popularity, occupying an important place in our lives and beginning to have a place in education. Among young people, instant messaging apps that can be identified as mobile-based social networks have been popular since the last decade (Xiongfei, Khan, Zaigham, & Khan, 2019; Ko & Kuo, 2009; Zhang, Moe, & Schweidel, 2017). While many instant messaging applications run on mobile devices, WhatsApp is one of the most popular mobile-based applications, especially among college students (Anglano, 2014). WhatsApp provides a variety of features that make it easy for users to send text, images, and videos of their contacts, and they can use the app to call each other (Anglano, 2014). The number of WhatsApp users is increasing, from >200 million active users in April 2013 to 700 million in January 2015 and >1 billion active users in January 2016 (Statista, 2016). The effectiveness of different instant messaging platforms in education can be determined by maintaining different aspects of these applications, which may increase learning opportunities (Smith, 2010) and learners' enthusiasm in learning (Cifuentes & Lents, 2010) interactions between students in personal, school, and curriculum related areas (Smith, 2010), and create a sense of belonging (Sweeny, 2010). To this end, a question arises, whether the time students spend on WhatsApp can increase the social capital of students, which in turn leads to an increase in students' mental health?
Therefore, the current study attempts to examine the impact of time spent on WhatsApp and students' psychological wellbeing through social capital. In addition, this study also explores the role of social integration in WhatsApp time usage and BOC, WhatsApp time usage and BOC relationships.
Previous studies found that students spend a lot of time and energy on social media applications, mainly to maintain their original relationships and initial social relationships during academic life (Wen, Geng, & Ye, 2016). Therefore, in an academic environment, understanding the social and psychological implications of WhatsApp in relation to student well-being is necessary. In this regard, the role of the underlying mechanisms has become very important in determining the impact of WhatsApp use on individual psychological health, as such; establishing direct links is not so simple. Many studies have used social capital as an intermediary mechanism to establish the use and performance of social media (Pitafi, Kanwal, Ali, Khan, & Waqas Ameen, 2018; Ali-Hassan, Nevo, & Wade, 2015; Bassani, 2006; Valenzuela, Park, & Kee, 2009) and social media use and behaviors (Hofer & Aubert, 2013; Li & Chen, 2014). However, a knowledge gap still exists in terms of establishing the link between WhatsApp use and student psychological wellbeing through the mediation of social capital. Thus, this study strives to address this corresponding gap in existing research (Lee et al., 2018; Sheer & Rice, 2017; S. Yang, Liu, & Wei, 2016) and investigates potential mechanisms for how time is spent on new digital communication technologies and how it can affect the students' ability to maintain and build social capital in their daily lives. Furthermore, the study explores the impact of social capital perception on student psychological well-being and distinguishes the categories of social capital such as bridging social capital (BRC) and bonding social capital (BOC) (Ellison, Steinfield, & Lampe, 2007), and then evaluates social capital's intervening role in the relationship between WhatsApp interactions and student well-being.
Some scholars have pointed out that interaction integration mechanisms (Brown & Eisenhardt, 1997) are very effective in improving the use of social media for the benefit of students. Other scholars have distinguished between formal and informal coordination and integration of social mechanisms to enhance individual psychological empowerment (Adachi, 2011; Tsai, 2001) through the use of digital devices. Therefore, this study seeks to deepen understanding of how social integration can help students use social media to manage and maintain social capital, ultimately leading to their psychological well-being. Based on the academic evidence, the present study examines the moderating role of social integration in the relationship between WhatsApp use and student psychological well-being through social capital (see Fig. 1). In this regard, this research extends the scope of previous research by demonstrating how new social media applications (i.e. WhatsApp) can enhance student psychological well-being and how the intermediary role of social capital in an academic environment can be strengthened.
Section snippets
Association between WhatsApp use and student psychological well-being
The concept of virtual communities is becoming more and more popular around the world. Students are encouraged to use social media applications frequently in order to cope with challenging academic tasks and busy schedules that sometimes hinder physical interaction with classmates and teachers. In this regard, WhatsApp is a powerful medium that helps students communicate and form an online network group where they can share information, update academic information, and help each other complete
Sample and data collection
To fulfill the goals of this study, a survey was conducted in Fall 2018 at two colleges and two universities in the Islamabad, Pakistan. The data were collected from Islamabad because Islamabad is the capital of Pakistan. People live in Islamabad almost from all over Pakistan, thus the students belong to these families. The cultural and geographical distinctiveness of this city in term of diverse cultural and ethnic grounds.
To obtain a representative sample of these colleges, the lists of
Reliability and validity tests
AMOS 24.0 software was used to examine the confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and the structural model. SPSS software was used for exploratory factor analysis (EFA) to test whether the measure shows factor loading above 0.4 (Hair Jr, Black, Babin, Anderson, & Tatham, 2010). The resulting value (see Table 2) is within the required load cut-off range (between 0.594 and 0.909), so there is no validity issue. Since all values are above the recommended level, this indicates no cross-loading issues.
Discussion
The purpose was to systematically investigate the relationship between students using WhatsApp and student psychological well-being Pakistan, including perceived social integration, BOC, and BRC. To this end, the present study argues that these different types of social capital are important factors influencing the relationship between individual psychological indicators and the use of WhatsApp. In addition, this research explores an empirical study model that strives to elucidate the complex
Conclusion
This study attempted to find the answer to this question whether the time students spend on WhatsApp can increase the social capital of students, which in turn leads to an increase in students' mental health? The findings of this study indicated that WhatsApp use is helpful to enhance the student psychological wellbeing via bonding capital and high presence of social integration. These findings are very consistent with previous studies (Wei & Gao, 2017; Wen et al., 2016). Therefore, focusing on
Declarations of interest
All authors declare that there is no conflict of interest for this study.
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