RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN ADDICTIVE USE AND SOCIAL COMPARISON AS SOCIAL MEDIA USE BEHAVIOURS AND LEVELS OF DEPRESSION AMONG ADOLESCENT STUDENTS

Abstract

Social media has become an integral part of human interaction in the present era. It has influenced them in many ways and provided numerous benefits such as online chatting, audio and video calling, opinions sharing, posting images, reading news, and advertising. However, some use behaviours on social are related to negative impacts on mental health such as developing symptoms of depression among adolescents, who spend more time than others using social media while being at their identity development. The present study is a correlation study between addictive use, social comparison, and number of social media platforms used on social media with levels of depression among adolescent students in Qasim region in Saudi Arabia. The constructs of social media are addiction and social comparison besides the number of social media platforms used were examined having 175 high-school student participants. To examine those relationships, correlations tools were run to analyze the data. The finding of the study there are significant relationships amongst the above constructs on levels of depression in high schools in Qassim region.