The Relationship between Social Media and the Level of Ambition, Depressive Symptoms and Anxiety among Secondary School Students in Irbid

Abstract

The various types of social media that contain news and publications play a major role in evoking the emotions of adolescent students, which leads to a strong impact on their emotions and thoughts. Also, the temperaments expressed through social networks are widely contagious. For example, reading a large number of messages from friends may generate negative feelings and this negative effect may increase for secondary school students who spend more than two hours a day on social media which puts them at risk of mental disorders such as depression, anxiety, etc., or could push them toward positive thinking about the future and the ambitions they have. All of this calls for research to understand the nature of these effects, whether negative or positive thus take the right actions as well as to guide the students and support them psychologically. This was the objective of this study. An analytical descriptive approach was applied to investigate the relationship between social media and the level of ambition, depressive symptoms and anxiety among twelfth grade students in a secondary school in Irbid. In this study the researcher used measures for each of the following: 1)the use of social media 2) ambitions 3) the depressive symptoms 4) anxiety. A total of 552 students were selected randomly from twelfth grade students enrolled in a secondary school in Irbid for the academic year 2017/2018. The analysis of the results highlighted a statistically significant positive relationship between the aim of using the account along with engaging in topics of interest on the social networking sites and ambition, a statistically significant positive relationship between the duration of using social networking sites along with engaging in topics of interest on social networking sites and both of depressive symptoms and anxiety, and that this relationship among males is stronger than that of females. The results showed that the duration of use of the account and engaging in topics of interest in the social networking sites indicated approximately 16% of the variation in the level of ambition. Also, the topics that attract attention on social networking sites and the duration of the use of the account both explained approximately 20% of the variance in the level of depressive symptoms. Furthermore, the duration of use of the account and the purpose of using the account both accounted for about 15% of the variation in the level of anxiety. The Study