Attitudes Towards Social Media: A Scale Development in Turkey
This report was written by me and my classmate Zeynep Aydın as a result of our class project during my psychology degree. Please note that this study is not published in a scientific bulletin.
Statistics showed that on 2017 social media usage become 135 minutes per day with 2.46 billion users worldwide. Since social media is becoming a huge part of our daily lives the current study focuses on developing a scale about the attitudes towards social media. Study 1 was as an interview with open-ended questions in order to understand individual’s attitudes about social media to develop a relatable scale. Study 2 was an online survey that included twenty-eight items to measure individual’s attitudes towards social media. There were 205 participants. Results of analysis lead to the elimination of some items and divided the attitudes as two component which was risks and benefits. Results showed a significant effect of social media usage on risk component. Moreover, there was a significant positive correlation between age and risks component and education level was significantly correlated with benefits component.
Keywords: social media, attitude scale
As a definition social media can be websites, applications that enables individuals which in this case ‘users’ to create content, share content or participate in social networks. According to statistics, on 2017 social media usage become 135 minutes per day. In U.S. users spend more than 215 weekly minutes on social media via smartphone, 61 weekly minutes via PC, and 47 minutes per week on social networks via tablet devices. In 2017 there is 2.46 billion social media users worldwide with expecting to increase in future. Even the usage of applications shows different age distribution, mainly young adults spends and use social media. It has started with computers but now via tablets, smartphones social media is accessible from anywhere and anytime.
A study which focuses how personality and other factors interact with Facebook usage found that extraverts who were scored high on need for approval spent more time on Facebook (Steers, Quist, Bryan, Foster, Young, & Neighbors, 2016). Social media has become a sign of personality and an area to create self-image for individuals itself and for people around them. It has been found that social media effects self-esteem (Ahmad, Jan, & Soomro, 2017) and body-image (Fardouly, & Vertanian, 2016) which again shows the importance of social media for psychology of individuals.
“Attention has been shifted from real to virtual world and visible to invisible friends.” (Khurana, 2015). Another crucial side of the social media is that it limits to social interaction most of the times, studies stated that specially in youth, individuals are always into their phones specially in socially crowded places. Aimed at the adults, social media is more about getting news and accessing information from different platforms while for newer population it is about sharing and liking contents. Some studies show that adolescents makes more use of different media and use more self-references and negative emotions while presenting themselves on social media compared to older population ( Pfeil, Arjan, & Zaphiris, 2009). Which creates the idea that attitudes towards social media is open to get affected by age differences.
Alternatively, we wondered about how people feel when they see posts about others emotional state in social platforms and seeing self- relevant information. Studies showed that posts about feelings weakly predicts people’s own emotions (Beasley, Mason, & Smith, 2016) but there was not a study about user’s own idea whether they like to see post about others privacy, so we consider this topic while developing the scale. Likewise, one study claimed that there are norms about appropriateness of posting some things on social media they found that participants reported stronger negative reactions to updates that are risky or offensive (Muscanell, Ewell, & Wingate, 2016) which we consider while developing the scale. Moreover, in Facebook relations between internalizing symptoms and Facebook communication differed for girls and boys (Ehrenreich, & Underwood, 2016) which creates the idea that attitudes towards social media is open to get affected by gender differences.
Even now the organizations realized the huge impact of social media, now every company knows the importance of social media to connect with costumers and even sell their products via applications. Also new jobs emerged such as being a blogger or being social media manager of the company etc. Even if it looks beneficial, it can lead to destroy business as well also because everything is public and there are sites of costumer’s complaints, when there is a mistake that company makes it goes viral and company name goes down.
Likewise, there is claims about social media that it takes too much time from the individuals, it limits the face to face communication, destroys social skills, also it gives individuals the ability to create fake profiles and say whatever they want freely which is called cyber bullying. Even those little examples can show the importance of social media. Earlier studies tried to understand the effects of the social media both from the negative and positive perspective. Which we tried to consider this problems as negative or positive attitudes of individuals for social media.
Furthermore, now social media is the place for everything. More than companies joining to social media or selling products, there is a term called ‘slacktivism’ which means supporting a political or social action with very little effort such as signing or joining a campaign. Studies showed that social media plays a huge role in activating political participation (Lee, Shin, & Hong, 2017) which can be the effects of slacktivism. The beneficial side is campaigns can spread to millions of people, but it is still that effective? Or does it only help individuals to feel more relief about themselves on doing something about world’s complications which is another conflict of social media killing real activism and creating slacktivism.
In our current study we developed a scale with the purpose of understand the attitudes that individuals hold towards social media. Since social media is growing day by day we tried to understand what people think about social media in terms of the pros and cons. About pros and cons, a research has been done in order to understand the effects of social media found mixed results which means some individuals thinks social media is beneficial whereas others think that it is harmful (Vogel, & Rose, 2016). With mixing both beneficial and risky sides, we tried to come up with a scale that consist negative attitudes and positive attitudes towards social media.
Method
The study was conducted with the aim of developing a scale that examine understanding people attitudes towards social media. There were 2 studies which were Study 1 including the interview phase and Study 2 including the questionnaire phase.
Study 1
Participants. Study 1 included the interviews that conducted with randomly chosen six participants. There were three male and three female participants in that stage. Demographics were not asked. The interview was based on the examination of participants’ opinions about social media.
Measure and Procedure. There were 10 questions, nine of them were open ended, and the aim of the interview was basically developing items for the scale based on participants’ responses on these interviews. The open-ended questions were like “Is social media is a need or not?”, “Does social media influence the interpersonal relationships?” (See Appendix B for all interview questions.). The interview was also included one fill the blank type of question as “I am using/not using social media because… (at least three sentences)” to see the overall point of view of participants’ on social media.
Study 2
Participants. Study 2 was included the questionnaire phase that developed with the light of interviews. There were 205 participants (86 males and 118 females) in total in that study. The range of ages was 17 to 51 (M=22.29, SD=6.554). There were 127 high school graduated, 66 university graduated, 6 doctorates, and 3 secondary school graduated participants.
Measure and Procedure. The survey was designed as internet-based. It was filled by participants in a google document page and entered the page with the given URL. The questionnaire included twenty-eight items including sixteen reversed items. The items developed with the topics that mentioned in interviews and basically divided to two such as items referred negative attitudes like “It irritates me to see shares with animal abuse in social media”, “I see social media as waste of time” and items referred positive attitudes like “I like to spend time I social media.”, “Social media is a beneficial platform.”. Items for negative attitudes were reversed (See Appendix A for the list of all items).
Result
The study was designed to develop a scale that examines people’s attitudes towards social media. There were twenty-eight items including sixteen reversed items. The items developed with the topics that mentioned in interviews and basically divided to two such as items referred negative attitudes and items referred positive attitudes. Before the analyses, items for negative attitudes reversed (See Appendix A for the list of all items). The Cronbach’s alpha of reliability test that included all items at the questionnaire was .742. Then the dispersion and distributions of items checked. Item 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 9, 18, 23, 28 were eliminated because of their kurtosis did not range between -2 and 2 so that mean was far away from normality (See Table1 for all kurtosis values of all items.).
After the elimination of items with too high or too low distribution values, Cronbach’s alpha of reliability test with remained items was .757. Item correlations lead to elimination of Item 5, 7, 14, 15, 17, 20, 22, 24, 25 because of the item-total correlation values for these items were less than .30 (See Table1 for all item-total correlation values of all items.). Elimination of these items with low item-total correlation, the new reliability test was run with remained items. Cronbach alpha of this reliability test was .850.
Factor analysis was conducted with remained items which were Item 1, 10, 12, 11, 13, 15, 16, 19, 21, 26, 27. There were two components which were named as benefits and risks. Benefits component included Item 1, 10, 12, 16, 19, 21, 26, 27 which were the items for positive attitudes towards social media and risks component included Item 11, 13, 15 which were the items for negative attitudes towards social media (See Table 2 for each value of items for both components.).
Independent T-tests was carried out to examine any effect of gender and social media usage on both components, also total item average without components. There was significant effect of social media usage on risks component, t(201)=2.067, p=.040, such that participants who use social media rated higher on risks components compared to who does not use social media. Moreover, we can claim that social media users are more aware of the negative sides of social media and rated more negative attitudes towards it. The effect of social media usage on total attitudes average was also significant, t(3.419)=7.352, p=.003, which would be expected that participants who use social media expressed more attitudes towards it compared to the ones who does not use (See Table 3 for descriptive of all conditions.). However, there was no significant effect of gender on neither risks, t(202)=.512, p=.609, nor benefits, t(202)=.723, p=.470, components and on total attitudes average, t(202)=.995, p=.321.
Bivariate correlation was carried out to examine relationships between components with including also total item average without dividing components and age of participants, graduation level of participants, and how frequently they use social media (See Table4 for Pearson correlation for each item.). There was a significant positive correlation between age and risks component, r(200)=.197, p=.005, such that older participants are more aware of the risks of social media and have negative attitudes compared to the younger ones. Education level was also significantly corelated with benefits component in positive way, r(201)=.142, p=.044, that means more educated participants were more aware of the benefits of social media and have positive attitudes towards it compared to less educated ones. Frequency of social media usage was significantly correlated with both benefits, r(204)=.370, p<.01, and risks, r(204)=.008, p=.008, also with total item average, r(204)=.383, p<.01. This result claims that participants who use social media more frequently show more attitudes both for risk and benefits compared to the less frequently users.
Discussion
At the time while developing this scale, we focused on dividing items of attitudes towards social media as two which were negative and positive attitudes. We eliminated certain items with kurtosis and skewness values far away from normality due to statistical results, and with the help of factor analysis, our final components called as benefits and risks of social media. Our results showed that there was a relationship between social media usage and risk components which means that users are aware of risk components that comes with social media. Moreover, there was a correlation between the individuals age and their perception of risks of social media. We can conclude that older individuals have more tendency to focus on the risky side of social media, the reason of this correlation can be because of the older people are not that close with social media which statistics in 2017 showed that mainly young adults spend and use social media so the older people, they can be more alienated towards social media in order to be careful since it is a platform that they don’t know very well so that’s why they are more aware about the risky factors. Also this result is parallel with previous findings about teenagers makes more use of social media ( Pfeil, Arjan, & Zaphiris, 2009).
Furthermore, results showed a correlation between education and benefit components which means that more educated individuals focused more on the benefits of social media. As an estimation, since the more educated individuals have a different environment and different social groups, people that they are interacting in the social media can be more educated in overall, compared to the less educated people, so they are surrounded by this educated platform individuals see more beneficial sides of social media such as getting information, reading news, communication, overall using social media in a good way. Similarly, this result was parallel with previous findings of Khurana, 2015 which states that how attention shifted towards the virtual world and there are invisible friends now. Because you have this free-will to create a different platform for your accounts which can be another subject to look on further researches. In our moment, we have the ability to decide and choose our friends, job, colleagues, even neighbors which was an ability that we did not have before. Now the social media is everywhere and anywhere you can create your own social group via your followers, the individuals you follow and when something is annoying you have you the ability to block them in order to create this better and beneficial environment, it is an opportunity that we did not have before because individuals did not have this possibility to block or unfollow some person that they did not like or simply that gives them a bad vibe. How this social media environment and ability of shaping this environment can affect individual’s well-being can be another topic for further research.
Moreover, there was a correlation between the frequency of social media usage and both beneficial and risky side. Which means that the individuals who were using social media more frequently can see both sides that social media has. Since they are spending lots of time on social media they do not only check social media once or twice then close it down which is thing that decreasing their chance of seeing disruptive things. With spending more time on social media, they experienced both beneficial sides and risky sides.
Limitations
Social media is a broad area and each platform has different users and a different purpose, in an overall look when asking participants about social media we don’t know what exactly goes through in their mind which is a limitation for our study because each platform of social media represent a different sample. There are platforms only focuses on music, photography, quotes, news, ideas etc. Since it as huge area with different aspects, getting them all together under the name of social media can create complexity for the participants perspective because while answering these questions every participant may not be only think about their attitudes towards overall social media but their attitudes towards overall the application/platforms that they were using.
Another limitation of the recent study was that it was an online survey. Online survey has its beneficial sides like answering to questions more accurately or freely since there is no researcher pressure exist and we can have a larger sample but at the same time it means that every participant completed this survey in a different environment, different day time. Some participants may have completed it via their smart phones, tablets or computers which seems okay but since this study is about social media and social media is mostly used by people who uses smart phones, tablets and computers, it can be predictable that they may have already surfing on the social media before and after they did this survey because they already have these resources which can increase their tendency to give positive or negative comments in a more exaggerated way. Since they were not only thinking about overall social media they were just using it because the survey and the social media is used by the same devices.
Recommendations
Previous research showed that social media has a huge effect on individuals’ life and the number of users are increasing every day and it is becoming a huge part of our lives. This scale can be used in very different areas such as in our time social media is now a platform to show your personality and your taste/perspective via different applications, individuals attitudes towards social media scale can be the first step in order to understand whether individuals focuses on the beneficial or risky side of social media. To have a greater picture about individual’s personality our how they present themselves in social media can be clue for researches like a personality analysis but with the touch of social media since now social media is used by everyone in everywhere and anytime. Also social media is becoming a part of marketing as well, there are organizations and companies presenting their brands and drawing this image of what their company and their products look like in different platforms, it can be beneficial to use the attitudes towards social media scale in order to understand the clients perspective about social media whether they think the social media has risky or beneficial sides or both to have a more clear picture about it is an effective thing to sell or show products online.
In addition, this scale can be adding as another variable to see the individuals perspective about social media because it is an huge topic and everyone is aware of it without the age, gender, race differences. Moreover specially the areas of social psychology; e.g. sexist posts, political post etc are available in social media which can be searched in more detail, cognitive psychology; e.g. memory tests, visual test, listening test are available in social media or individuals overall perspective about social media can be searched in more details on this area of psychology, lastly developmental psychology can use this scale in order to grasp the subject of social media in a better way since now social media is used by every age group and specially by the teens in order to understand the effect of social media better attitudes towards social media scale will be beneficial.
References
Beasley, A., Mason, W., & Smith, E. (2016). Inferring emotions and self-relevant domains in social media: Challenges and future directions. Translational Issues in Psychological Science, 2(, 238–247. doi:10.1037/tps0000086
Ehrenreich, S. E., & Underwood, M. K. (2016). Adolescents’ internalizing symptoms as predictors of the content of their Facebook communication and responses received from peers. Translational Issues in Psychological Science, 2, 227–237. doi: 10.1037/tps0000077
Fardouly, J., & Vartanian, L. R. (2016) Social media image concerns: Current research and future directions. Current Opinion in Psychology, 9, 1–5. doi: 10.1016/j.copsyc.2015.09.005
Jan, M., Soomro, S. A., & Ahmad, N. (2017). Impact of social media on self-esteem. European Scientific Journal, 13 doi:10.19044/esj.2017.v13n23p329
Khurana, N. (2015). The impact of social networking sites on the youth. Journal of Mass Communication & Journalism 5, 285. doi: 10.4172/2165–7912.1000285
Lee, C., Shin, J., & Hong, A. (2017) Does social media use really make people politically polarized? Direct and indirect effects of social media use on political polarization in South Korea, Telematics and Informatics. doi: 10.1016/j.tele.2017.11.005
Muscanell, N. L., Ewell, P. J., & Wingate, V. S. (2016). “S/He posted that?!” Perceptions of topic appropriateness and reactions to status updates on social networking sites. Translational Issues in Psychological Science, 2, 216–226. doi: 10.1037/tps0000074
Pfeil, U., Arjan, R., & Zaphiris, P. (2009). Age differences in online social networking — A study of user profiles and the social capital divide among teenagers and older users in MySpace. Computers in Human Behavior, 25, 643–654. doi: 10.1016/j.chb.2008.08.015
Steers, M. L. N., Quist, M. C., Bryan, J. L., Foster, D. W., Young, C. M., & Neighbors, C. (2016). I want you to like me: Extraversion, need for approval, and time on Facebook as predictors of anxiety. Translational Issues in Psychological Science, 2, 283–293. doi:10.1037/tps0000082
Vogel, E. A., & Rose, J. P. (2016). Self-reflection and interpersonal connection: Making the most of self-presentation on social media. Translational Issues in Psychological Science, 2, 294–302. doi:10.1037/tps0000076
Appendix A
List of Items
Item 1: Sosyal medyada zaman geçirmeyi severim.
Item 2: Sosyal medyada cinsiyet ayrımı yaratan paylaşımlar beni rahatsız eder. (reversed)
Item 3: Sosyal medyada hayvan istismarı paylaşımları beni rahatsız eder. (reversed)
Item 4: Sosyal medyada beni rahatsız eden herhangi bir içerik yoktur.
Item 5: Sosyal medyada çıplaklık içeren paylaşımlar beni rahatsız eder. (reversed)
Item 6: Sosyal medyada insanlar kendilerini olduklarından farklı gösterirler. (reversed)
Item 7: Sosyal medyada siyasi paylaşımlar beni rahatsız eder. (reversed)
Item 8: Sosyal medyada çocuk istismarı paylaşımları beni rahatsız eder. (reversed)
Item 9: Sosyal medyada şiddet yanlısı paylaşımlar beni rahatsız eder. (reversed)
Item 10: Sosyal medya insanları birleştirici bir rol oynar.
Item 11: Sosyal medya kullanımının zaman kaybı olduğunu düşünürüm. (reversed)
Item 12: Sosyal medya insanlar arası iletişimi güçlendirir.
Item 13: Sosyal medya insanlar arası ilişkileri olumsuz etkiler. (reversed)
Item 14: Sosyal medya kullanımı bağımlılık yaratır. (reversed)
Item 15: Sosyal medya kullanımını gereksiz bulurum. (reversed)
Item 16: Sosyal medya yararlı bir platformdur.
Item 17: Sosyal medya insanlar arası sınıf ayrımını belirginleştirir. (reversed)
Item 18: Sosyal medya ihtiyaç duyulduğundan daha fazla kullanılmaktadır. (reversed)
Item 19: Sosyal medya sayesinde gündemden haberdar olurum.
Item 20: Sosyal medya bir arada bulunulan ortamlardaki (örn., arkadaşlarla buluşmak/topluca yemek yemek) iletişimi olumsuz etkiler. (reversed)
Item 21: Sosyal medya bilgilendirici bir platformdur.
Item 22: Sosyal medya yüz yüze iletişimlerini kısıtlar. (reversed)
Item 23: Sosyal medya etkinliklerden (konser vb.) kolayca haberdar olmamı sağlar.
Item 24: Sosyal medyanın kolay erişilebilir olmasını severim.
Item 25: Sosyal medyanın ticari amaçla kullanılmasını yanlış bulurum. (reversed)
Item 26: Sosyal medyanın genel olarak olumlu bir etkisi vardır.
Item 27: Sosyal medyayı kullanmayı severim.
Item 28: Sosyal medyayı kullanmak ya da kullanmamak insanların tercihidir.
Appendix B
Interview Questions
1)Sosyal medya denince aklınıza ne geliyor?
2)Sosyal medya kullanıyor musunuz? (Hangi uygulamaları)
3)Sosyal medya hakkında ne düşünüyorsunuz?
4)Sosyal medyanın kullanım süresi hakkında düşünceleriniz nelerdir?
5)Sosyal medyada rahatsızlık duyduğunuz paylaşımlar var mı? Varsa nelerdir?
6)Sosyal medyanın size veya insanlara bir şeyler kattığını düşünüyor musunuz?
7)Sosyal medya insanları gruplara ayırıyor mu? Ya da ayırıcı bir rol oynuyor mu?
8)Sosyal medya bir ihtiyaç/gereklilik mi yoksa keyfi mi?
9)Sosyal medya insanlar arası ilişkileri etkiliyor mu?
10)Sosyal medya kullanıyorum/kullanmıyorum çünkü … (3 madde en az)
