Abstract
The growth in social media use has given rise to concerns about the impacts it may have on users' psychological well-being. This paper's main objective is to shed light on the effect of social media use on psychological well-being. Building on contributions from various fields in the literature, it provides a more comprehensive study of the phenomenon by considering a set of mediators, including social capital types (i.e., bonding social capital and bridging social capital), social isolation, and smartphone addiction. The paper includes a quantitative study of 940 social media users from Mexico, using structural equation modeling (SEM) to test the proposed hypotheses. The findings point to an overall positive indirect impact of social media usage on psychological well-being, mainly due to the positive effect of bonding and bridging social capital. The empirical model's explanatory power is 45.1%. This paper provides empirical evidence and robust statistical analysis that demonstrates both positive and negative effects coexist, helping to reconcile the inconsistencies found so far in the literature.
Highlights
The use of social media has grown substantially in recent years (Leong et al, 2019; Kemp, 2020)
There are several reasons for Common Method Bias (CMB): (1) it mainly occurs due to response “tendencies that raters can apply uniformity across the measures;” and (2) it occurs due to similarities in the wording and structure of the survey items that produce similar results (Jordan and Troth, 2019)
The present study reveals that the social and psychological impacts of social media use among University students is becoming more complex as there is continuing advancement in technology, offering a range of affordable interaction opportunities
Summary
The use of social media has grown substantially in recent years (Leong et al, 2019; Kemp, 2020). There are increased concerns regarding the possible negative impacts associated with social media usage addiction (Swar and Hameed, 2017; Kircaburun et al, 2020), on psychological well-being (Chotpitayasunondh and Douglas, 2016; Jiao et al, 2017; Choi and Noh, 2019; Chatterjee, 2020). Smartphones sometimes distract their users from relationships and social interaction (Chotpitayasunondh and Douglas, 2016; Li et al, 2020a), and several authors have
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