Development and Validation of the Need for Online Social Feedback (NfOSF) Scale

Abstract

People are known to adjust their behavior based on social information. Starting from 2004, social media rapidly became a new social arena for human interaction, and scholars widely studied the effect of likes on people’s psyche and behavior. However, likes are just one of the possible social feedbacks among many others on social media. Moreover, social feedback influence should be analyzed recognizing individual differences in people’s needs and desires for them. This work was aimed at developing and validating (internally and externally) a scale able to capture people’s perceived need for online social feedback (NfOSF) applicable to most social media platforms. Data coming from 1403 Italian participants were used for this purpose. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses appeared to support a two-factor structure for the NfOSF scale, while Pearson’s correlation confirmed the expected positive relations of NfOSF factors with Narcissism, Need to Belong, FOMO, and Social media reputation perception. Eventually, NfOSF scale reliability appeared optimal.