Factors Determining the Addiction of Sri Lankan Software Engineers towards Social Networks

Abstract

A new form of social web communities where people meet each other, share interests and activities are on an exponential growth on social networking sites. Hence, in recent decades a rapid development of innovative internet based communication has emerged. It is a known fact that the software engineers face work-family life issues due to many reasons such as heavy work load, rigid deadlines, and work over time, etc. Thus, this research tends to investigate whether the software engineers are addicted to social networking sites to gain their lacking social behaviors such as social interaction, communication and entertainment etc. due to the nature of their profession. This study is hypothesized that the social network addiction is influenced by the attributes of social media networks namely; Social Interaction, Entertainment, and Communication. Structured questionnaire consists of three sections with 26 Likert scale questions was administered among 140 randomly selected software professionals and 84 responses were collected. Regression model was developed to identify and interpret the relationships. Through the analysis, it is identified that the majority of software engineers highly use social networking sites for communication and social interaction activities and all the three factors are positively correlated towards social network addiction