| dc.description.abstract | This study was carried out to assess the use of social media among the students of TVET institutions in
Kiambu County. In the context of today’s electronic media, social networking sites have come to mean individuals,
using the Internet and web application to communicate in previously impossible ways. This is largely the result of a
culture-wide paradigm shift in the uses and possibilities of the internet itself. The objectives of the study were to
find out the preferred social networking sites among TVET students, Reasons for utilization, assessing the factors
that influence the respondents to visit a social media site or even do repeat visits to the same site and time spent per
session on social media. The study adopted the descriptive survey research design which was employed to derive
responses from a sample size of 357 from 10 stratified sampled TVET students in Kiambu who were selected
through random sampling techniques. Data were collected from this population using questionnaire. The 357
respondents completed and returned the questionnaire correctly representing 100% return rate. The results of the
study reveals that 337 (94.3%) TVET students in Kiambu are on social media platform. The study established that
Facebook was the most common used social media 33.6 % among the TVET students in Kiambu County, followed
by whatsup 27.2%, twitter at 17.9%, Imo 8.7% and other social media 12.6%. The study established that most of
the students 38% were using the social networking sites in sharing knowledge, 34% interaction with friends, 11 %
collaboration and 17% for communication purpose. The findings of the study indicated that internet enabled
phones are the leading means of internet access among students of TVET Institutions in Kiambu County with 69.5
% of the respondents using phone technologies, followed by the Personal computer 23.4 % and cybercafé with 7.1
%. The current study indicated that the influence of friends as the main reason accounting for 60.8 % of the
profiled respondents. The media also was found to be a major influencer in promoting the use of social media
accounting for 24.9 %. The study indicated that the influence of parents was 11.3% and relatives accounted for
3% influence. | en_US |
