Conclusion 2: Participant Perceptions

Conclusion 2: Participant Perceptions

The perception of social media addiction plays a key role in defining a young adult’s behaviours. Screen time data is used to track all aspects of cell phone usage, but few users examine their daily social media use as its own aspect and only view the total screen time hours. This may be due to the preconceived notion that cell phone and social media users are constantly on their phones. With the ease of accessing any app in milliseconds while using their phone, users do not always realize the behaviours that follow. When analyzing questions #9, #10, and #14 together, there seems to be some disagreement between the claims of excessive social media usage and the participants actual feelings towards their use of social media. An equal number of responses (71.2%) stated they did not feel uncomfortable when not using social media (see Figure 5), yet the same number of participants (71.2%) claimed they use social media “often” to “more often than intended” (see Figure 4). A high number of participants also stated that social media use has become a part of their daily routine. There must be some deliberation amongst these factors when it comes to social media addiction. In the interviews, both participants stated that they see the addictive tendencies that may result from excessive social media usage. Although, they did not openly state that they believe they are addicted to social media. This information together shows that young adults may exhibit addictive tendencies to social media but there is a negative perception of the word “addiction”. The difference is shown between one’s personal definition of addiction and their actual behaviours. Throughout this current study, the researchers worked diligently to not use the term addiction until the end of the interview to avoid confirmation bias. Although, it may be concluded that young adults are aware of social media addiction and their behaviours, but do not want to define themselves as addicted due to the negative connotation attached to the concept. The negative perception of “addiction” may skew the results when researching social media addiction, and this is shown through the inconsistency in results regarding individual perceptions, claims, and behaviours.