Factors Triggering Usage of Social Networks: An Empirical Study in West Bengal

The paper is a study on Social Networks (SN) currently being used regularly by hundreds of millions of people worldwide–its usage patterns with respect to demographic characteristics, emotive issues and other functional factors such as health, politics, education, Business, work place and Cybercrime. Usage of SN has analyzed between three emotive factors e.g. loneliness, happiness, interpersonal with respect to functional factors viz., Health, Politics, Education, Business, Workplace and cybercrime. Also investigations have been done on differential impacts of social media usages on both demographic profiles and personality traits with respect to all nine attributes. Respondents of the study are mostly urban, young adults, single, belonging to nuclear families, gender wise more or less evenly divided, educationally graduate or postgraduate, mostly students or in service, with a majority earning up to Rs 20,000, though a significant 22.4% of them have incomes above Rs.100,000 pm. A majority of the respondents use social media between 2-4 hours, mostly between 9pm-12 midnight and mostly resort to smart phone for social media usage. Descriptive Statistics indicate that among the respondents loneliness factor and promoting interpersonal relationships are not so much important for using SN, while SN usage helps enhance their happiness, obtain education, health related information, expand their business, their workplace related activities, remain politically engaged and finally, help remain appraised on cybercrimes.