The Roles of Social Media towards dealing with difficulties in Young People in Chiang Mai
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Abstract
Social media is popular among Thai young people. However, there is few studies have investigated whether Thai young people used social media to deal with their problems, especially young people in Chiang Mai. The aim of this study was to explore the roles of social media on the ways that young people in Chiang Mai applied to deal with difficulties. Totally, there were 21 Thai students participated in the in-depth semi-structured interviews. A thematic analysis was applied to analyse data in this study. The results indicated that social media played a small but crucial role to help young people in Chiang Mai to deal with difficulties in their lives. Specifically, most participants used social media to gain the social support and advice from their existing friends while some participants vented their feelings on social media sites to make them feel better. Moreover, some participants used social media to distract themselves from the difficulties they encountered. Finally, most participants perceived social media as a beneficial tool to help them to solve their problems but there were some participants who realised about the disadvantages of social media use.
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References
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