Facebook Usage of Sri Lankan Consumers: Consumption Perspective of Social Media

Social media has become pervasive, impacting the social and cultural fabric of our society and changing the nature of social relationships. Facebook, being the second most visited website in the world and No: 01 in Sri Lanka, could be identified as a special kind of addiction today where an average user browses Facebook at least for 30 minutes a day from computers or smart devices and gets exposed to diverse content on Facebook as a habit. Marlatt, Baer, Donovan, and Kivlahan, defined addictive behavior as “a repetitive habit pattern that increases the risk of disease and/or associated personal and social problems” or “the behavior continues to occur despite volitional attempts to abstain or moderate use”. Compulsive, excessive, impulsive, uncontrolled, and indulgent were also listed instead of the term “addictive”. In this study, the researcher has attempted to investigate the relationship of compulsive consumption behavior on Facebook has with the demographic factors of individuals.


Introduction
The web has rapidly enhanced the capacity for people to interact with one another without the boundaries of their locationMore specifically, social media has become one of the major platforms,which enable people to interact with each other across geographical boundaries. Though, there are numerous social network sites, Facebook is considered to be the most popular social media platform. Facebook, being the second most visited website in the world and number one in Sri Lanka, could beidentified as a special kind of addiction today where an average user browses Facebook at least for 30minutes a day from computers or smart devices and gets exposed to diverse content on Facebook as a habitSince the literature suggests that individuals deal with social media content in three ways; consumption, participation and production, it could be suspected that excessive usage of Facebook could lead to addictive consumption which may derive numerous social issues. It is an accepted fact that an addiction is known to destroy human beings and their relationships and Facebook addiction is no exception to thisFurther, it is evident that there has been a significant lack of empirical research in this regard from social marketing perspective despite the fact that it has been examined in psychological viewpoint [1][2][3][4][5].

Objectives
Concerning the need of a study to examine the Facebook addiction from a social marketing perspective, this study aimed to examine the level of addictive consumption of Facebook among Sri Lankan consumers. Further, it attempted to examine variations of Facebook addiction among various demographical characteristic of consumers.

Methods
The main purpose of the study is to examine the relationship between demographic factors of individuals and compulsive consumption behavior on Facebook with special reference to Sri Lankan Facebook users. As per previous literature, Bergen Facebook Addiction Scale (BFAS) has identified many factors that might have been symptoms of Facebook addiction [2]. As the above research gap explains, there is a need of use salience, mood modification, tolerance, withdrawal, conflict and relapse dimensions to examine the Facebook addiction. The study is descriptive in nature and survey was carried out to test the association between compulsive consumption behavior on gender of individuals. The research was single cross-sectional as data was collected from the sample at a single point time. The unit of analysis was at individual level consumers. Convenience sampling technique was used to select the sample and the sample size was 254. The survey method was used to collect data and sample data was collected using self-administered questionnaire which was distributed among respondents. Descriptive statistics were generated with the aid of SPSS version 23.

Analysis and Results
In this section the researcher validate objectives by testing hypothesis developed for each objective by using analysis techniques as appropriate. The first objective is to examine the degree of Facebook addiction among Facebook users in Sri Lanka.   According to the one sample t-test, the significant value is 0.004 which is less than the alpha value of 0.05. Therefore, the researcher concluded that mean value of Facebook addiction is not equal to 3 among Facebook users in Sri Lanka (Table 2).

Gender and Facebook addiction
Second objective is to examine significant difference between males and females in terms of Facebook addiction. Independent sample t-test was carried out to see if there are any significant differences in the means of two groups in the variables interest (Table 3).
According to the result of Independent sample t-test, the significant value is 0.000 which is less than the alpha value of 0.05, the mean value of Facebook addiction of Males is significantly different to mean value of Facebook addiction of Females. Therefore, the researcher concluded that Facebook addiction vary according to the Gender.   The results revealed that 70% of the respondents demonstrate addictive consumption of Facebook whereas 20% of respondents are seriously addicted. Further, it was evident that males are more addicted to use Facebook than females. Moreover, income and level of education seemed to have an impact on addictive consumption of Facebook.

Education level and Facebook addiction
This section examine whether the education level of the Facebook users has an influence on Facebook addiction, the researcher tests whether the Mean Values of Facebook addiction distributions between social class categories significantly differs to each other. According to Sekaran, Analysis of variance (ANOVA) helps to examine the significant mean differences among more than two groups on an interval or ratio-scaled dependent variable [6,7]. Therefore, appropriate test for this requirement is one way ANOVA test. The variables under interest satisfy the pre-requisites to run the independent sample t-test. (Dependent Variable is a ratio scale, Independent variable has independent Five (05) categories, and Dependent variable is normally distributed under the Five (05) categories.
Skewness and Kurtosis values between (-2) and (+2), data is normally distributed. Therefore, distribution of Facebook addiction between levels of education is normal.   According to Table 5 Levene test statistic (0.001), it is less than α (0.05), which suggests that variances are not equal. Hence, the statistic for ANOVA test is extracted from Welch sig value from the Table 6. P value (0.283) is greater than α (0.05), therefore, the researcher concluded that Facebook addiction does not significantly vary according to the levels of education of the Facebook users in Sri Lanka.

Discussion/Conclusion
Findings of the study shed lights on social as well as policy implications. Policy makers in education sector could consider the possibility of students to be addictive in social media usage and educate students about negative consequences of such an addictive behaviour. Further, consultation and mentoring programmes could address the issue of addictive social media consumption and improve individuals' self-control in social media usage. Moreover, effectively designed awareness campaigns may be useful in controlling addictive social media consumption.
Among sample Facebook users, 55.1% of respondents are Male while 44.9% of respondents are Female which indicated that there is no much difference between number of users in gender aspect. Although in previous literature mentioned that Females are more in Facebook, current statistics suggest that Males (Mean: 3.0310) have been used Facebook more than Females (Mean: 2.6168) in Sri Lankan context. As per Socialbakers.com, (which compiles social media statistics globally) higher number of Facebook users in Sri Lanka are males. So, this evidence is further validated by the sample's gender composition. Therefore, researcher can conclude marketing activities on Facebook should consider posting content that are favourable to men than women on Facebook, due to the fact that Male are dominant on Facebook in Sri Lanka. Majority of users (77.2%) are belong to age 18-27 which means that young generation in Sri Lanka is much engaged in Facebook. This finding is mainly consistent with the findings of Thompson. In Thompson's study, gender differences were examined and according to the findings, females were more likely than males to report spending more time on Facebook. There are many success stories about Facebook usage but at the same time, it also has some negative impacts because of addictive behavior on Facebook. Facebook addiction, excessive use of the Internet or, compulsive consumption behaviour on Facebook has been discussed. The amount of time spent on Facebook, checking social media frequently, spend entire nights on the site, daydreaming about the status updates and comment that have been received are the emerging evidences for negative impact of Facebook addiction. It is essential to understand the level of addiction predict the other factors, because the reality of addictive behavior on Facebook is a growing problem for many users.