Life satisfaction moderates the associations between motives and excessive social networking site usage

Abstract

It has been suggested that excessive social networking sites (SNS) users might use SNS as a method of coping with their life problems and that psychosocial well-being variables might interact with users' motives for using SNS in predicting problematic SNS use. The present research explores whether the association between motives (i.e. self-expression and passing time) and excessive SNS usage is moderated by the user's life satisfaction. A total of 996 college students were recruited from two colleges in Chongqing China. The participants were divided into excessive and nonexcessive SNS usage groups based on their mean score from the excessive SNS usage measurement. Regression analyses revealed that life satisfaction moderates the effect of motives on problematic SNS behaviors among excessive SNS users. Specifically, the motives were significantly related to excessive SNS usage for those with lower life satisfaction, while neither motives were associated with excessive SNS usage in participants with higher life satisfaction. For nonexcessive users, there was no significant interaction between the studied motives and life satisfaction for predicting excessive SNS usage, although the motives were significantly related to the extent of the users' problematic SNS behaviors. ARTICLE HISTORY

Well-Being and Social Media: A Systematic Review of Bergen Addiction Scales

“…The effect size of BFAS on Life Satisfaction is roughly estimated as ranging from 1.2% and 10% across the three studies. Interestingly, in Wang, Gaskin, Wang and Liu [15], for people that do not excessively use Weibo social media, the correlation value is 0.05 and resulted in being not statistically significant, which highlights the absence of any sort of linear relationship between addiction and well-being.…”

“…The other four papers were excluded because data analysis was not suitable for the systematic review process (e.g., lack of descriptive statistics, no correlation coefficients provided for the variables of interest). Finally, it was possible to identify 10 studies that describe the correlation between BFAS or BSMAS or BSNAS, and some measure of well-being [15,[42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50].…”

“…In our dataset, six studies [15,43,45,[47][48][49] employed a well-being measure that falls into the hedonic well-being framework. BFAS (or the version for Weibo) was used in all of them.…”

“…Together with the increasing usage of such media, scholars observed that excessive Internet, gaming, or social media use could be associated with addiction [14,15] and other psychiatric comorbidity (e.g. depression, alcohol abuse) [16].…”

Feelings and functionality in social networking communities: A regulatory focus perspective

“…However, some differences do indeed exist between traditional and virtual groups regarding various antecedents of a sense of community. Additionally, individuals have unique perspectives and thus may be motivated to use the same social networks for a variety of different reasons (Oh, Ozkaya, & LaRose, 2014;J.-L. Wang, Gaskin, Wang, & Liu, 2016). Such differences result in a mix of both individual characteristics and situational settings that play an important role in the complete experience of a social media network (Totterdell, Holman, & Hukin, 2008).…”