The Relations Among Social Media Addiction, Self-Esteem, and Life Satisfaction in University Students

Abstract

The use of social media has grown exponentially to the extent of engaging close to one third of the world’s population as of January 2016. Actually, social media statistics have been reporting an average annual increase of 10% in total number of users. These extremely impressive statistics have been triggering researchers’ interest in investigating this phenomenon and its impact on every aspect of users’ lives. Our study is an attempt to contribute to the knowledge that is building up in relation to this phenomenon by examining the relationships between the addictive use of social media, self-esteem, and satisfaction with life. To achieve this purpose, a generic questionnaire, the Social Media Addiction Questionnaire (SMAQ), was used stemming from the Facebook Intrusion Questionnaire. Respondents completed an online survey questionnaire which collected demographic information and responses to SMAQ, Rosenberg’s Self-Esteem Scale, and the Satisfaction with Life Scale. In addition to assessing SMAQ’s psychometric properties, data analyses included Pearson correlations between the variables, regression analysis, and structural equation modeling. Results showed that a one-factor model of SMAQ had good psychometric properties and had high internal consistency. As for relations, addictive use of social media had a negative association with self-esteem, and the latter had a positive association with satisfaction with life. Furthermore, path analysis showed that self-esteem mediated the effect of social media addiction on satisfaction with life.