Research on the usage of social media in free time and related to studying or teaching under SMAT project (GRU-12–P–LP –30 –CJ–DE)
According to a national survey in Bulgaria for 2011 about 45 % of the Bulgarian families have access to Internet. The most active Internet users are young people (from 16 to 24 years old) which represent 80 % of all Bulgarians that use Internet. Referring to people aged between 65 and 74 years old, we can see that just 6.2 % of them can work with a computer.
An interesting fact is that some 2 million Bulgarians (the population of Bulgaria is around 7 million) are on Facebook. Yet another thing to mention is that a lot of people are flocking to other social media like Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc. 51% of teens in Bulgaria have a profile in a social network which is a little bit below 57%, the average number for the EU.
In the research phase of the project we explored the attitudes of the target group towards the usage of social media in leisure time and for studying/ teaching. Our research showed the following facts:
• 21 (out of 25 participants in the survey) state that they use computer daily in their leisure time. But it is interesting to point that just about the half of the respondents use computer daily related to studying or teaching/ at work.
• 18 persons declare that they do not use Blogs for professional purposes at all.
• Just 4 of the participants say that they use social media services daily for studying or teaching.
• 9 of the inquired persons answered that they had never used file sharing services (Dropbox, Google drive, etc)
• About half of our respondents claim that they were motivated to use social media more often in their professional work in the future.