Examination of high school students' attitudes related to social media (Tarsus example)

In this study, it was aimed to examine social media attitudes of high school students' according to socio-demographic variables and social media usage status variables. The study group is consist of totally 611 students 379 of male and 232 of woman, that are chosen from three high schools that are studiying at 9th, 10th, 11th and 12th grades depending Mersin Tarsus District National Education Directorate in 2018-2019 academic year. While collecting information to specify the high school students' attitude towards social media, the Social Media Attitude Scale developed by Otrar and Argın (2013) and Personal Information Form prepared by the researcher were used to collect the data. Data were analyzed with SPSS 22.0 program. The t-test was used to determine whether the attitudes of the high students' differed according to their gender and the scores for all other independent variables were analyzed by one-way ANOVA. The source of the difference was examined by Sheffe test. According to the results of the study, it was found that high students' attitudes towards social media differed according to gender, type of school, frequency of using social media networks, and most commonly used social media networks. Keywords: Social media, attitudes, the internet, social networks