Development of the Social Media Addiction Scale

Abstract

In this research, it was aimed to develop a scale to detect the social media addiction of university students. The data collected from 775 university students revealed that the scale was composed of four factors. Of these four factors, the first one called as “occupation” explained itself 17% of the variance, the second one called as “mood modification” explained itself 9,8% of the variance, the third factor called as “relapse” 8,8% of the variance itself, the forth factor called as “conflict” explained itself 23,5% of the variance. These four factor composed of 41 items totally explained 59% of the variance altogether. The correlation between the scale and “Facebook Addiction Scale” adapted from Internet Addiction test of Young for facebook (Çam and İşbulan, 2012) was found to be 0,75. Again, the correlation between the scale and “Generalized Problematic Internet Use Scale 2”, the original version of which belongs to Caplan (2010) and whose Turkish adaptation work was conducted by Tutgun, Deniz and Moon (2011), was found to be 0,66. Internal consistency coefficient (α) was found to be ,967. Test-retest reliability co-efficient was found to be 0,84. As a result of the studies conducted, the scale was found to be valid and reliable and named “Social Media Addiction Scale” (SMAS).