Determining the relation between social media use and sleep quality in university students in Turkey

Abstract

Background Today, social media sites are very common and used extremely much. This situation influences the lifestyles of people. This influence is also observed in human health. The purpose of this study is determining whether social media use has an influence on sleep quality or not. Methods The study was conducted on students who were studying at various faculties at Inonu University; and the Cross-Sectional Study Design was used in it. Questionnaires were applied to 397 students in our study. The distribution of the participants among the faculties was calculated according to the number of the students in weighted style. The dependent variables of the study were the points received from the Pittsburg Sleep Quality Index (PSQI) which was developed by Buysse et al. in 1989. If the total point is higher than 5 in the index, it shows ''Bad Sleep Quality''. The Mann Whitney U and Kruskal Wallis Tests were used in the analyses. Results The average age of the students who participated in the study was 20,89 AE 2,05. The average daily social media use amount of the students were found as 3,26AE2,72 hours. The rate of the students whose sleep quality was bad was 56,4%. The sleep quality of the girl students were less than those of the boys' (p < 0,05). Among the faculties of the university, the Faculty of Theology was determined as having the worst sleep quality with a median value of 7 (min-max:1-17); and the Faculty of Fine Arts was determined to have the best sleep quality with a median value of 3,5 (min-max:3-8) (p < 0,05). As the daily duration of social media use and the weekly frequency of it increases, the sleep quality decreases (p < 0,05). Conclusions It has been determined that the sleep quality of more than half of the university students is bad. The use of social media in students influence sleep quality in a negative way. Student activities that will increase social interactions must be developed instead of social media use.