Social networking addiction scale

Abstract

Social networking is the new norm of the society as many of us remain “online” 24*7. However, excessive use of it would result in social networking addiction. There are some existing tools to measure social networking addiction but all of them suffer from conceptual or/and methodological problems. The present research aimed at developing a theoretically and psychometrically sound tool to assess social networking addiction by conducting three different studies. Study 1 established the factor structure of the social networking addiction scale as a higher-order construct having six first-level factors. In study 2, we found that social networking is a relatively enduring characteristic as test-retest reliability was found to be.88 in a time span of 25 days. Study 3 was conducted to establish the convergent and divergent validity of the social networking addiction scale (SNAS). Problematic internet use, Facebook addiction, average time spent on the internet daily and loneliness were chosen to test the convergent validity of SNAS, while life satisfaction was used to test the divergent validity. The result establishes the convergent and divergent validity of SNAS. The scale situated nicely between problematic internet and Facebook addictions as it shared 53% of the variance with the former and 25% with the later.