How compulsive social media use influences college students' performance: a structural equation analysis with gender comparison

Abstract

The purpose of the paper is to uncover antecedents that can predict compulsive social media use by college students and examines the impact of such use on their academic, social and physical performance. This paper reports the findings from an online survey with 223 respondents at one university in Taiwan. The study shows that college students' compulsive use is predicted by hedonic technology characteristics and negatively related to student's academic, social and physical performance; male students who use social media to strengthen their friendships online are less likely to be compulsive users; compulsive use of social media is found to have a higher negative impact on academic performance for male students than for female students. Further, this paper provides a research model of the relationships among technology characteristics, impulsive social media use and college students' academic, social and physical performance and offers several important recommendations regarding social media use.