Exploring the Association Between Social Media Addiction and Relationship Satisfaction: Psychological Distress as a Mediator

Ahmet Rifat Kayis,Mark D Griffiths,Begum Satici

doi:10.1007/s11469-021-00658-0

Abstract

Social media use has become part of daily life for many people. Earlier research showed that problematic social media use is associated with psychological distress and relationship satisfaction. The aim of the present study was to examine the mediating role of psychological distress in the relationship between social media addiction (SMA) and romantic relationship satisfaction (RS). Participants comprised 334 undergraduates from four mid-sized universities in Turkey who completed an offline survey. The survey included the Relationship Assessment Scale, the Social Media Disorder Scale, and the Depression Anxiety and Stress Scale. According to the results, there were significant correlations between all variables. The results also indicated that depression, anxiety, and stress partially mediated the impact of SMA on RS. Moreover, utilizing the bootstrapping procedure the study found significant associations between SMA and RS via psychological distress. Consequently, reducing social media use may help couples deal with romantic relationship dissatisfaction, thereby mitigating their depression, anxiety, and stress.

Highlights

Establishing social relationships is one of the basic needs of human beings (Heaney & Israel, 2008)
When general characteristics of social media addiction have been examined, it has been found that individuals tend to have restless thoughts concerning the urges and craving to be on social media, lose their self-control over their use of social media, spend excessive amounts of time staying on social media which in turn lead to negative impacts on their relationships with their families and friends, and compromise their occupation and/or education (Andreassen et al, 2012; Griffiths et al, 2014)
Multicollinearity was checked with variance inflated factor (VIF), tolerance, and Durbin-Watson (DW) value

Summary

Introduction

Establishing social relationships is one of the basic needs of human beings (Heaney & Israel, 2008). Social media addiction has been associated with physical and emotional infidelity, romantic separation, decline in the quality of romantic relationships, and relationship dissatisfaction (e.g., Abbasi, 2019a, b; Demircioğlu & Köse, 2018; Valenzuela et al, 2014). These aforementioned findings indicate that social media addiction negatively affects relationship satisfaction

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