What’s up with WhatsApp? a case study among Vaalachanai residents in Batticaloa district, Sri Lanka

Abstract

In the current scenario where everyone is involved in their busy Schedule, people often do not have time for their relations, friends and family. But gratefulness to the technology that it accommodates to reduce the gap among our relations. If they want to communicate with the beloved ones they wish to prefer chat on various applications which are free of charge and simply required the least cost of internet package which performs life easier rather spend the high charge of calls and messages to telecom companies. There are a number of applications accessible in the market which people use according to their preference, WhatsApp application is one of them. The main objective of the study is to examine the influence of WhatsApp usage on residents of Vaalachanai. The study was undertaken amongst the residents of Vaalachanai in Batticaloa district. A total of 110 residents’ reflections were collected by the questionnaire and required statistical analyses were performed using SPSS software at 5% significance level. Majority of respondents were Males, Aged between 21 to 35 years old. Most of them were students. Among the various actions on WhatsApp, more people prefer chatting and information sharing. Generally, residents prefer to interact with friends and family. 45.5% of the residents spend less than 1 hour on WhatsApp. Half of the people keep their internet for 24 hours. Majority of the people say that the group message is very useful to keep in touch. Recently during the last 1 year, most of them have been connected to groups from 1 to 3, but more people did not leave from any groups. This study recommends that the positive usage of WhatsApp like collaborative study and research should be encouraged while extreme usage for entertaining purposes is reduced to the least possible.