Facebook And Self-Esteem Essay

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The topic of my research is Facebook usage and its effect on self-esteem. Self-esteem is an important part of the self, as it also affects how we react and behave in different situations. In social psychology, the self-esteem is studied often. Social psychology is an important study because it helps us understand people’s thoughts and behaviors in certain social situations. Someone with low self-esteem might behave differently on social networks compared to someone with higher self-esteem. People have different personality traits which are reflected in their behaviors in social situations. As an example, a study has shown that those with trouble trusting in their partners in close relationships frequently spend time on Facebook monitoring the …show more content…

With this understanding, social networks would be able to cater to different people with different self-esteem levels. In addition, colleges will be able to point out which students are most likely to have low self-esteem, and can better provide them with the proper resources to improve their self-esteem, or to ensure that their self-esteem isn’t endangering themselves or others around them. Resources can be provided to ensure that self-esteem doesn’t affect a student’s studies. This would lead to generally happier college students with better mental health and result in a better and stronger college community. A community with such mental health will show it in their academics, which also makes the college a better research institution and even improve admissions. However, it doesn’t necessarily have to be specific to only colleges, since high social network usage also exists in other age groups, such as the teens. High schools could also utilize their resources and the better understanding of social network usage and self-esteem to improve the mental health of their students. This allows for a greater diversity of students who are able to succeed when given equal opportunities to succeed through the resources available to them. Lastly, even families who are worried about certain family members can better determine if that …show more content…

The survey will be anonymous. The first part of the survey will ask questions to help me determine the different patterns of Facebook usage through frequency of status updates, purpose of status updates, frequency of chat usage to connect with others, activity in Facebook groups or pages, and frequency of usage to view the news feed. For the status updates section, students will provide their frequency in posting status updates—within a week—and their purpose of their posts or the content of their posts. Next, students will provide how often they use the chat feature of Facebook to connect with others, and how many people do they connect with within a day. Then, students will provide information on what their other activity on Facebook consists of, from just scrolling through the newsfeed to active involvement in groups or pages. I hope to find different patterns in UCSB students’ Facebook usage. For example, a pattern could be those who frequently post status updates, but don’t connect with others through Facebook. The second part will consist of Rosenberg’s Self-Esteem Scale, which is a commonly used test to determine self-esteem. Its answers are on a four-point scale, from strongly disagree to strongly agree. Each answer on each item will be scored appropriately to result in a score from 0 to 30 to determine self-esteem. Scores below 15 will suggest low self-esteem, 15 to 25 will show normal

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