Association between Social Media Addiction and Mental Health Among International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM) Undergraduate Nursing Students

Abstract

Introduction: Addiction to the social media could interfere with an individual’s daily life and have an impact on their psychological well-being. The emergence of social media is seen to have many influences in students’ life, and they tend to neglect their studies by spending more time on social media. Very few studies were conducted regard to social media and mental health in Malaysia. Aim: To study the association between social media addiction and mental health among nursing students. Material and methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted on 208 undergraduate nursing students, IIUM Kuantan. A questionnaire consists of four sections; socio-demographic data, social media usage, social media addiction, and mental health were distributed. The data were analysed by using IBM Statistical Package Social Science (SPSS) version 22.0. Results: It is found that most of nursing students, 54.3% (N=113) are slightly addicted to social media, 37.0% (N=77) of them are moderately addicted, 5.3% (N=11) are highly addicted and 3.4% (N=7) have no addiction to social media. On average, the students experienced moderately severe depression and anxiety with the same mean score for each with 28.99 (9.637). They also had mild stress with mean score of 8.47 (5.436). It is found that there is an association between social media addiction with depression (r = 0.448, p<0.05), anxiety (r = 0.448, p<0.05) and stress (r = 0.313, p<0.05) respectively. For sociodemographic, there is no relationship between age, gender, level of study and CGPA. Conclusion: It was found that there is an association between social media addiction and mental health status. Social media can have a negative impact on mental health among the students. These findings seek for initiation of interventions for better social media management and mental health improvement. It could serve as a reference for future researchers to conduct their studies in the related area.