Dependency dispersion and patterns in social media use

Abstract

Social media has become ubiquitous in modern society and has fostered constant accessibility to social interaction and connectedness, especially among children and young adults. This may be beneficial by providing more opportunity to fulfill social needs, although repercussions of this change have also been examined over the past decade. Previous research assessing social media addiction consistently includes measures of physical and psychological dependency to classify when social media use crosses into addiction. This study examines whether personal construct psychology’s dispersion of dependency grid is valid and reliable in predicting social media addiction. The dispersion of dependency grid measures how many people an individual relies on for support across various problematic situations. It was predicted that individuals who score low on dispersion of dependency measures will most likely score high on social media addiction scales. The combination of undispersed dependency and frequent social media use may influence individuals to place more dependence on social media interactions for the fulfillment of social needs, scoring higher on social media addiction scales. If dependencies are high in dispersion, the individual has less dependency available to place on social media, therefore will be less likely to score higher on social media addiction scales. No significant relationships were found in this study, potentially due to the approach used for measuring dispersion of dependency. Future research further examining social media addiction and dispersion of dependency is needed to identify the relationship between these two variables.