Social Media Dependency Scale

Abstract

Social media has emerged as a primary source of information, entertainment, and communication. Social media dependence is expected to have an impact on many important aspects of a person’s life, including peer communication, trust, public engagement and purchase behaviors. Built on the Internet Dependency Scale and the Television Affinity Scale, Men and Tsai developed a four-item, one-dimension scale that measures social media dependency. As an initial test of construct validity, Men and Tsai examined the effects of social media dependency on relational outcomes utilizing structural equation modeling. Individual media dependency theory explains how users rely on using a particular media to satisfy individual goals. Both social psychological factors and structural factors influence the formation of media dependency. People who rely more on social media tended to be more engaged and have more interactions with corporate social media pages than those users who rely less on the technology.