ABSTRACT

Internet usage is prominent in every aspect of life in this 21^st century. The contributions of internet in the field of education are also remarkable. Internet is favoured for education but excessive non essential use of internet is a cause of concern for the students, parents, school and community.Many researchersfound excessive non essentialuse of internet to be related to various psychological disorders, adverse health effects, deteriorating educational achievements and poorer social skills. A person needs to be possessing social skills or competencies which could help him to be a better adjusted person in the society. This will help him to be mentally healthy, peaceful and successful in his life. The present paper deals with studying the Internet usage of the secondary school students in relation to the social competence. The sample for the study is 1000 randomly selected secondary school students from the rural and urban areas of Jalandhar district in equal proportion. The tools of data collection were researchers self constructed and standardised scale- ‘Internet Usage Scale by Saini S. and Kaur P. (2017) and the Social Competence Scale by Sharma and Shukla (1992) The results revealed that the internet usage of males is significantly more than the females and the internet usage of urban students is significantly more than the rural students. Further the findings reveal that there is significant difference between the Social competence scores of secondary school students having low high and average internet usage levels. But there is no significant difference between the social competence scores of students from the different subgroups formed with the interaction effect of Internet usage levels,gender and locale. With regard to the relationship between internet usage and the social competence; a significant negative relationship was found between the two variables.