Relationship between Social Media Usage and Nomophobia during the Covid-19 Pandemic

Abstract

People worldwide are largely engaged with mobile phones, especially Smartphones. It is the communicative tool used by people of all ages, but specifically by young generations. Many students engage in social media activities by using Smartphones. The main aim of this research is to investigate the role of gender in the correlation between social media usage and nomophobia during the COVID-19 pandemic. The samples are randomly selected from western Odisha through the purposive sampling method. The researcher collected data from 80 samples by using the “Nomophobia Questionnaire (NMP-Q)” and the “Social media addiction scale (SMAS)”. The researcher examined the data with the help of “descriptive statistics”, “Pearson product moment correlation coefficient analysis” and “uncorrelated t-test” through SPSS version 20 software. This study concluded that there is a positive correlation between social media usage and nomophobia.  This study also revealed that there is no significant difference between male respondents and female respondents based on their level of nomophobia and social media usage.