Research pick: Educational distraction - "Right to good mental health: procrastination and social media addiction among girl students"

A study in the International Journal of Human Rights and Constitutional Studies has explored the various factors that might contribute to procrastination among female university students.

For many people, it can take a lot of willpower or the threat of some kind of penalty to ensure they keep themselves on track in terms of studying and working rather than finding alternative, unrelated activities with which to distract themselves from the task at hand. S. Chandni, V. Sethuramalingam, and N. Rajavel of the Department of Social Work at Bharathidasan University in Tamil Nadu, India, have investigated procrastination among 277 female university students living in university hostel-type accommodation. They utilized statistical analyses such as cross-tabulations, one-way ANOVA, t-tests, and Step-wise Regression to process data about the use of social media, mobile phones, and demographic factors on procrastination.

The team found that the age of the students significantly affected how much they procrastinate. Younger students were more prone to delaying tasks on which they were purportedly focused. Additionally, the number of years someone had been studying was also a factor that influenced procrastination. The longer a student had been at university the more inclined were they to procrastinate. Perhaps more intriguingly, family income was identified as a contributing factor. A higher level of procrastination among the students was associated with lower family incomes.

Less surprisingly, perhaps, was that the team found a direct correlation between time spent on social media and the degree of procrastination. Given that social media has become a ubiquitous distraction for so many people it is perhaps not surprising that young students succumb to its whiles just as do so many other people. Those students with dual-SIM phones displayed a greater degree of procrastination than those with single-SIM devices. Why that should be is not entirely clear, except perhaps to say that high-end phones and the choice to have a dual-SIM device may well be associated with a greater degree of “tech savvy” and an inclination to enjoy the functionality of more sophisticated devices.

Procrastination among students, and others, linked to social media use specifically, poses a challenge for educators, and in the wider world, perhaps employers, where it might be detrimentally affecting academic performance, personal growth, and even job prospects.

There is perhaps now a need for policymakers and healthcare professionals to look at this particular aspect of social media activity and to find novel ways to support students, and others, in overcoming what might be considered a problematic addiction in circumstances where it is seriously detrimental to the individual user, their education and their life prospects.

Chandni, S., Sethuramalingam, V. and Rajavel, N. (2024) ‘Right to good mental health: procrastination and social media addiction among girl students’, Int. J. Human Rights and Constitutional Studies, Vol. 11, No. 1, pp.99–112.