Measuring Social Media Addiction Among University Students

Abstract

New developments in technology have changed the habits of people and people can find the things of real life in virtual worlds. Interacting in online platforms and sharing options of social media have made the life of students more easy while Social Media Addiction(SMA) becomes a problem among young people, causing to mental and physical problems in long run by  using it in an excessive manner.  The aim of this study is to determine the usage purposes of social media and SMA level among university students according to age, gender, usage years and daily usage. For that aim, 665 students were surveyed in an online platform at Bingöl University in 2019. Descriptive statistics,  Kruskal Wallis Test, One-Way ANOVA test, Factor Analysis and Correlation Analysis statistical methods are used to analyze and validate data by SPSS 20 software.  Instagram, youtube and facebook were found to be three mostly used social media networks respectively.  Maintaining communication with existing friends, listening music and sharing things are main usage purposes for females while males prefer social media for following a group, playing games and meeting new people.   According to gender, there are significant differences just for conflict factor that males spend more time on social media than doing their daily responsibilities and activities, showing that males are more addictive. Moreover, younger university students have higher conflict addiction  score and as students use social media more in years and daily, they become more addictive in general. Students spend daily most of their social media time for communicating with existing friends and chatting. Daily usage has the strongest correlation with occupation factor. Furthermore, the strongest correlation is seen between relapse and conflict factors and the most effective factor on Social Media Addiction Scale (SMAS) was found to be conflict factor.