HEALTH IMPACTS OF FACEBOOK USAGE AND TEXTAPHRENIA AMONG UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS OF HEALTH CARE PROFESSIONS

Background: Facebook is currently the world’s most popular social networking website. Textaphrenia is a newly emerging public health problem, only a few people are aware about the signs and symptoms of Textaphrenia. We would like to conduct a study among undergraduate students of various health care professions to determine the association between Facebook usage/mobile texting and health effects.

Materials and Methods: A Cross-sectional study will be conducted at a reputed private university in Malaysia involving 377 undergraduate students of Pharmacy, Medicine and Dentistry to study the association between association between Textaphrenia and health impacts as well as Facebook usage and Textaphrenia. The sample will be selected by Stratified Random Sampling technique and data collection will be conducted for 3 months (1st August 2014 to 31st October 2014). A self-developed, expert validated, pre-tested and self-rated questionnaire will be used for data collection. The data collected will be tabulated and analyzed by using the statistical package for social sciences (SPSS) version 18.0 for Windows. Baseline data on categorical variables will be presented in the form of proportions and their 95% confidence intervals (CIs). Comparisons between two categorical variables will be done by using the Chi-square test. Odds Ratio and its 95% CIs will be used to study the strength of association between the exposures and outcomes. Multiple Logistic Regression analysis will be conducted to remove the confounders. In this study, p-value <0.05 will be considered as statistically significant.

Results: Data collection is under process. Details of results are awaited.