A Three-factor Model of Social Media Addiction

Abstract

Introduction. Social media addiction is one of the most widespread non-medical addictions. Its numerous negative consequences have created a psychological problem, which has made it essential to study factors of social media addiction. The corresponding model can solve the problem and add insight into the factor structure. This study aims to construct such a model. We hypothesized that the ‘psychological state’ factor plays a dominant role in this model. Methods. We used exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis to examine the social media addiction factor structure. Also were used Kendall’s nonparametric correlations and Pearson’s parametric correlations. Used software: R-based statistic tools, Jamovi, IBM SPSS-22. Respondents: 618 social media users (430 women aged 16–76 years, M = 37.01; 188 men aged 16–67 years, M = 31.3). Results and Discussion. The model of social media addiction includes three factors – ‘psychological state’, ‘communication’, and ‘information receiving’. A reliability index for the model was 0.828 (p-value < 0.001). We confirmed the initial hypothesis. Moreover, correlations of the ‘psychological state’ factor with anxiety, depression, loneliness, extraversion, self-esteem, and life satisfaction (closely related to social media addiction) exceed the correlations of other factors and the Inventory as a whole. A stronger correlation between the ‘psychological state’ factor and the personality states mentioned above and traits explains greater social media addiction severity among females. In different societies, the model of social media addiction may have a fundamentally different factor structure. The three-factor model of social media addiction demonstrated a high degree of reliability. The model adequately describes the essence of this kind of addiction and may be used to examine theoretical and practical perspectives of this problem.