The impacts of behavioral factors on social media addiction

Abstract

In last decade, social media has started to play a crucial role on people’ lives. Almost everyone uses at least one of the social media platforms which gives users an opportunity to be connected to the world. However, excessive social media usage can bring with social media addiction that causes failure in academic life, business life, and even in private life. In order to prevent social media addiction, it is important to understand which factors are effective upon social media addiction. The main aim of the present study is to discover the impacts of specific behavioral factors which are openness, loneliness, self-esteem, life satisfaction, creativity, stress, neuroticism, social intelligence, and narcissism on social media addiction. In this study, a survey was conducted with 506 participants. Descriptive statistics, independent sample t tests, one-way analysis of variance tests, correlation analyses and structural equation modeling were applied to test the hypotheses and the theoretical model of the current study. The results of these analyses showed that while demographical factors which were gender, marital status, age, and education level affected social media addiction, income status and occupation had no influence on social media addiction. Moreover, positive relationships between openness and creativity, openness and self-esteem, self-esteem and life satisfaction, loneliness and neuroticism, and negative relationships between self-esteem and neuroticism, life satisfaction and stress were detected. In the present study, mainly, it was found that some behavioral factors as stress, neuroticism and social intelligence had a positive impact on social media addiction, though, openness, creativity, self-esteem, loneliness, life satisfaction and narcissism had no impact on social media addiction.