Abstract:
Globalisation has changed human lives in the era of ICT. ICT has become an important
source of innovation across the globe. Though there are positive social and educational
benefits of ICT use, scholarly attention is now on identifying whether ICT usage is
harmful since it is related to psychological aspects. On the other hand, ICT usage is
comparatively and significantly higher among university students. Therefore, identifying
the impact of ICT usage on the psychological well-being of students is crucial for the
higher education sector. This study mainly focused on examining how factors like
smartphone usage, social media usage, internet usage, device usage, video gaming and
-being. To achieve the
proposed research objectives, the quantitative research method was adopted, and data
was gathered in the form of primary data through self-administered structured
questionnaires. 383 undergraduates from the state universities of Sri Lanka participated
in the study and the stratified sampling technique was employed. Collected data was
analysed using the SPSS package and basic descriptive statistics, correlation analysis,
and stepwise regression tests were run in order to examine ICT usage and its impact on
the psychological well-being of undergraduates. Consequently, the findings revealed that
social media usage, internet usage, and television viewing have significant positive
impacts, while video gaming has a significant negative impact on the psychological well being of undergraduates. Meanwhile, smartphone usage and device usage have no
significant impact on psychological well-being. Further, internet usage is the most
influential factor of ICT usage, which has the strongest predicting power on
psychological well-being. The findings of the study would be beneficial to university
students, parents, academic and non-academic staff, social media developers, etc. for
further improvements.
