The relationship between the items of the social media disorder scale and perceived social media addiction

Research has focused on identifying addiction to social media, as it has become a major concern. Of the college students included in the current study, about 50% of them perceived themselves as addicted to social media between 75%-100% and about 20% of them perceived themselves as addicted to social media 100%. Moreover, the current study was the first to investigate if each item of a nine-item Social Media Disorder scale (preoccupation, tolerance, withdrawal, persistence, escape, problems, deception, displacement, and conflict) predicted perceived social media addiction. A stepwise regression analysis was utilized with a significance level of 0.001 to predict the perceived social media addiction as a function of the nine-item Social Media Disorder scale, followed by a hierarchical regression for confirmation. Among the nine-items of the Social Media Disorder Scale, withdrawal and persistence significantly contributed to the model. Specifically, withdrawal predicted 10.2% of perceived social media addiction, while persistence predicted 5.9% of perceived social media addiction.