FACTORS AFFECTING THAI UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS’ BEHAVIOR IN USING SOCIAL NETWORKING FOR EDUCATION

The popularity of Social Networking Sites (SNS) has grown rapidly after being introduced. The sites focus on building online communities of people who want to share own interested and/ or activities, or who want to explore the interests and activities of others. The objectives of this research were to study factors that affect the behavior of students to use social networking for education and to study relationship of variables that influence behavior. This research was applied from Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA) and Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). This model constructs of perceived usage, perceived ease of use, attitude toward usage, subjective norms, intention to use and usage behavior. The research method was survey technique with the 400 returned questionnaire from undergraduate students of a university in Bangkok, Thailand. The results showed that perception in perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, attitude toward usage, subjective norms and intention to significantly influenced usage behavior of social networking sites in education. These findings provide an understanding of the factors students’ behavior in using social networking for education. Higher educational institutions were recommended to utilize social networking sites as effective tool to communicate with their students. Teachers were also suggested to implement the sites as channels to communicate with their students more effectively.