Mahato Janaki *, Thapa Bindu, Chhetri K Deepti and Poudel Sharmila
Background: E-Professionalism is the behaviour and communications which encompasses traditional characteristics of professionalism in an online setting resulted from increased use of Social Media. Social media(SM) is a form of electronic communication through which users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, and other content. The present study aims to assess the utilization of social media and e-professionalism in nursing students and examine the association between utilization of social media and selected socio-demographic variables.
Methodology: A quantitative descriptive cross-sectional study design was used. The study was carried out among all the nursing students of Gandaki medical college, College of nursing sciences. Hence census method was adopted and the data were collected using a semi-structured self administered questionnaire from 25th October 2020 to 10th November 2020. Descriptive statistics (frequency, percentage, mean, standard deviation) was used for quantitative data analysis and inferential statistics (Chi-square) were used to find out the association between utilization of social media and selected sociodemographic characteristics of the respondents.
Findings: The study concluded that almost all of the students use the social media and 97.2% of them had good utilization of social media. More than half (69.4)% agreed that usage of social media for research has helped improve their grades, 44.4% agreed that social media have impacted GPA negatively, and 35.2% had neutral idea on improving communication skills. Likewise, 66.7% agreed that social media use had an adverse effect on their concentration. However 73.1% had poor knowledge on e-professionalism. No significant association was seen between knowledge level and selected demographical variables.
Conclusion: Based on the findings of the study almost all of the students used social media. Social media was excessively utilized to get information regarding current social events. Knowledge on e-professionalism was however relatively poor even though the utilization of social media was high. Hence an appropriate guideline on e-professionalism should be implemented.
