Exploring Different Effects of Internet Usages on Female Users‟ Social and Academic Behaviors

Female students in real life have varying interests and hobbies and sometimes they are much different than males in terms of hobbies and behaviors. One of the main differences is their branch of study and undertaken course. Mostly male students are interested in engineering courses or branches, whereas females are interested in nursing, medicine or arts courses. Female students are in minority in most of technical institutions in India and many infrastructural facilities and services are not targeted to them. For example, computer centers and some of laboratories are open till 12 midnight. Female students may not be able to use them because of their hostel rules; they are expected to be back in their rooms before 8PM due to security issues. To minimize difficulties arising out of such situations, institutions provide some computing and Internet facilities in their hostels, and in general these facilities are limited. Even though Internet facilitates minimizing geographical, social and cultural barriers, there are no brief studies on any significant impacts of these facilities on professional, social and personal pursuits of female students. Since, Internet provides an online life environment for users; we attempt to explore special behaviors of female students on Internet and the affects of these behaviors on their personal and professional life. This investigation is a deep study of female students’ and faculty members’/professors’ Internet usage behaviors in different periods of a semester. We attempt to analyze different affects of these behaviors on their personal, social and professional behaviors with the help of analyzing proxy server’s access log files, which were collected for the period of 30 months, of an engineering college in India.

Behavioral mining, Log file analysis, Internet usage behaviors, Proxy server logs, Web usage mining