Do Personality Traits Moderate the Impact of Social-Media Multi-Tasking on Academic Competence? Higher Education Perspective.

Abstract

The aim of this research study is to investigate the impact of social media multitasking on academic competence. Furthermore, this study also is looking for a moderating role of personality traits including, Openness, Extraversion, Neuroticism, Conscientiousness, and agreeableness. As to answer the research questions and hypotheses testing, researchers collected data from different universities that exist in Gujranwala, Pakistan, and valid response from 572 respondents was recorded, including teachers and students. The results were obtained by using M-plus software. The findings of this research indicates that social media multitasking has a significant negative effect on academic competence and indicated that personality traits significantly moderate among social media multitasking and academic competence except agreeableness which shows an insignificant moderation effect between social media multitasking and academic competence. This research study suggested that it is necessity for teachers and parents to motivate students for self-regulation of laptops, mobile phone and multi-tasking behaviors, the significance of encouraging students to acquire self-efficacy and learning. This is the first-time study in Pakistan which investigate a comprehensive model by using social media multi-tasking as an independent variable and academic competence as a dependent variable and drill the five dimensions of personality traits as moderators in this study.