Abstract
Facebook addiction is a growing issue that has increasingly attracted the attention of clinicians and researchers in a variety of countries and cultures. Relying on the Cognitive-Behavioral Model for Pathological Internet Use, and in a sample of Turkish undergraduates, we investigate whether mindfulness might account for how self-esteem and psychological problems (depression, anxiety, and stress) connect to Facebook addiction. A total of 298 college students completed measures of Facebook addiction, self-esteem, mindfulness and psychological problems, which we analyzed using path analysis, testing various models of how Facebook addiction might be predicted by these factors. We found that Facebook addiction was positively associated with psychological problems and negatively associated with self-esteem and mindfulness, with mindfulness fully accounting for the association between psychological problems, self-esteem and Facebook addiction. These results support the role of mindfulness in the prevention of Facebook addiction and the treatment of addicted individuals. This study also helps clarify previous research connecting mindfulness to Internet addiction, and extends those findings cross-culturally to a Turkish context.
Highlights
Social media has become ubiquitous and routine – Facebook is the third most visited website after Google and YouTube (Alexa, 2018) with 1.45 billion daily active users (Facebook®, 2018)
These results showed the common method variance being less than 50%, meaning that one general factor did not account for the majority of the covariance among the measures and that Common Method Bias (CMB) was not a likely contaminant of this study
The purpose of our study was to clarify the role of mindfulness in the connection between psychological issues and Facebook addiction
Summary
Social media has become ubiquitous and routine – Facebook is the third most visited website after Google and YouTube (Alexa, 2018) with 1.45 billion daily active users (Facebook®, 2018). Fifty-three percent of the total population of Turkey uses Facebook, spending an average of 2 hours and 48 minutes on social media per day; 25% of the 51 million active Facebook users are between the ages of 18– 24 (We Are Social & Hootsuite, 2018). Facebook use has clear benefits (e.g., enhancing socialization and learning opportunities; (O’Keeffe & Clarke-Pearson, 2011), there is the potential for addiction and problematic patterns of use (Andreassen & Pallesen, 2014; O’Keeffe & Clarke-Pearson, 2011). 22.6% of Turkish college students exhibit risk for Facebook addiction (Balcı & Gölcü, 2013)
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