Why waste your time on Facebook? : a temporal analysis of first-year undergraduate students and transition in UK Higher Education

• Main Author: Stirling, Eve
• Other Authors: Davies, Julia
• Published: University of Sheffield 2014
• Subjects: 370
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.605524

In this thesis I document a study of first-year undergraduate students' uses of Facebook to negotiate their transition into their first year at a UK university. I did this through a mixed method two-phase approach of large-scale questionnaires and a longitudinal connective ethnography, which took place across Facebook and the university campus. The analysis was undertaken using a temporal framework. I explore literature from three differing research areas; the corpus of literature on student experience at university; literature on social media and technology use by Higher Education (HE) students, and literature on time and space in HE. The focus of my research was to explore the realities of social media use by undergraduates, specifically their use of Facebook in the first-year transition to university. The findings are presented as narratives of six Facebook Friends presented across the academic year. These narratives illustrate themes, which emerged from the data and include "making friends in the digital" to "disconnection (I don't want to be here anymore)". The multi-sited approach allowed for observation both on Facebook and faceto- face, so as to go beyond the online/offline dichotomy to explore the complex relationship of the embedded and ubiquitous nature of Facebook in my participants' lives.