The Impact of Social Media on the Academic Life and Performance of High School Students in Eastern Province, Saudi Arabia

Social media has a vital part of an individual's life that allows people to communicate with one another. In recent days the prevalence of addiction to social media among students is a serious issue. The objective of this study was to assess the impact of social media on the academic life and performance of high school students in Saudi schools, in Eastern Province Saudi Arabia. This was a cross-sectional questionnaire-based study conducted in a Saudi school over 3 months (Nov 2020 Jan 2021), where 203 high school students were participated in the study. Data collected from the questionnaire included the academic performance in terms of school marks, the duration of social media use, time spend for studying, and social media addiction. Data analysis was performed using a statistical package for social science version 26 (SPSS) was used.  Most of the participants were male students 131 (64%) and half of them 82 (40.4%) were in their academic second year. The mean time spent by students studying in a week was 18.50(M=18.50, SD = 8.33), while 3.79 mean hours per day were spent by students to use social media (M= 3.79, SD=2.65). A large majority of the participants using WhatsApp 191(94%) followed by snap chat 176 (86.7%).  About 171 (84.2%) agreed that the time spend on social networks takes up their time for studying. Based on Internet distraction, 81.3% of the participants agreed that social network is the main reason for their distraction in studies. The time spend on studying per week were significantly associated with gender (P= 0.0001), age (P= 0.0001). Also there was significant difference between male and female in the final exam scoring (P= 0.0001). The results found that the use of social media among Saudi school students’ found high. Additionally, findings reported that the use of social media has distracted students from studying.