PERCEPTION OF FEMALE TERTIARY INSTITUTION STUDENTS ON THE INFLUENCE OF SOCIAL MEDIA ON THE RATE OF DIVORCE

Social media have become a necessary evil today, with lots of harm but a trend cannot be done without. With Facebook having the greatest number of users (over 1 billion) worldwide (2020), one-third of females aged 18-34 check Facebook when they first wake up, even before going to the bathroom. In the U.S., Facebook has been linked to 66 percent of divorces and the 81 percent of the nation’s top divorce lawyers claiming clients have cited using social networks as damning evidence against their spouses in the past five years (Abramovich, 2019). Another study analyzed the relationship between social media platforms, marriage satisfaction, and divorce found that there is a link between social media and increasing divorce rates (Snider, 2018). It is not surprising that Nigerian people subscribe and log on to these sites more than they do to the other social network sites. With the current wave of the social media subscription, the fulcrum of this study thence is to examine young people who have been reported to be tech savvy (very proficient) based on the assumption that the recent increase in the presentation of marital failures is related to social media usage. The objectives of the study are (i) determine if social media threads reflect divorce cases. (ii) determine the spate at which social media threads reflect divorce issues. (iii) determine if social media threads reflecting divorce issues influences the perception of undergraduate students on marriage and divorce. (iv) determine the extent of rippled effect of divorce issues reflecting on social media on undergraduates. (v) determine whether undergraduates form new opinion on marriage and divorce as a result of social media contents on divorce issues. (vi) examine the pattern of impact of social media threads of divorce issues on undergraduates. The study employed Survey method. Survey population was 25,646 students of Federal Polytechnic Offa who were randomly selected. A sample size of 335 respondents was drawn from the population through simple random sampling method. A structured and validated questionnaire was used for data collection. Tables, percentages and charts were used for data presentation. The findings were that: i. Undergraduate students of Federal Polytechnic Offa affirmed that indeed social media influence the increasing spate of divorce cases in Nigeria. ii. Results obtained opined that there is corresponding impact within which the increasing spate of divorce cases in Nigeria could be associated with exposure and usage of social media. iii. The rate at which undergraduate students come across social media threads/messages about marriage collapse as high and these social media threads reflect divorce case in its raw form. iv. Social media threads reflecting divorce issues influences the perception of undergraduate students on marriage and divorce. v. Undergraduates form new opinion on marriage and divorce as a result of social media contents on divorce issues. vi. Threads reflecting divorce issues changes their perception about marriage and family,