As duas faces do cyberloafing: a distração social na internet e seu impacto na saúde mental dos docentes de Universidades Federais brasileiras

Abstract

Faced with the Covid-19 pandemic, there was an increase in the use of information technologies and, consequently, individuals became more exposed to the effects caused by this use. Cyberloafing emerges as a practice arising from this use of technologies and the internet for purposes other than its core activity, be it work or study. Faced with this great exposure to technologies, social cyberloafing acts as a practice present in this context, where individuals use social networks to procrastinate their activities or even seek rest during the workday. From this reality, there are the teachers who, during the pandemic, had to adapt to the new way of continuing with their activities, through remote teaching and the use of technologies to teach their classes, and this high workload ended up taking them to them to get sick. Thus, this research aims to understand the impact of social cyberloafing on the mental health of professors at Federal Universities in Brazil. To this end, the main concepts and models that address Cyberloafing and Social Cyberloafing, the Effort Recovery Model and Psychological Distancing, the Ego Depletion Theory and Fatigue, as well as Related Self-efficacy to Recovery and Mental Health. The method of the present study consists of a quantitative approach of descriptive character, an online survey was adopted for data collection. The instrument used in the present study underwent cross-cultural validation, and consists of five scales that address the respective topics of the theoretical framework. The study population is based on professors from federal universities in Brazil, where a sample calculation was stipulated for collection, based on the population of professors in the country. From the data collection that resulted in 384 respondents, the analyzes were carried out, which consist of a confirmatory factor analysis for the validation of the instrument, a descriptive analysis of the sample and a regression analysis to test the hypotheses raised based on the contribution theoretical. Finally, as a result of the present study, it was found that the cross-cultural validation was positive and all variables present in the scales reached high factor loadings. And from the hypotheses tested, it was possible to show that social cyberloafing is related to psychological distancing and Fatigue as a paradox relationship. The self-efficacy related to recovery, however, did not obtain results that demonstrated a relationship with psychological distance, but it indicated that the higher its level, the lower the fatigue of the teacher. And finally, mental health was not related to psychological detachment, but it was found that the higher the level of fatigue of the teacher, the lower their mental health.