Research Question
Research Question
This study’s research question is: Are the majority of young adults in the Edmonton area addicted to social media? The sub-question is: How does social media addiction impact the lives of young adults in the Edmonton area?
Significance of the Study
Social media addiction is an increasing issue as technology evolves. Technology has become an integral part of people’s lives, whether it be through school, work, or personal use. This research study assesses how much time the average young adult, which includes people between the ages of 18 and 24 years old, spends on social media each day. Most of the research done on this topic has been developed before the Covid-19 pandemic, meaning this current research gives insight as to how increased time at home has affected everyone’s social media usage. Many workplaces and schools have switched to an online format for some of their delivery, increasing each individual’s time spent online. Learning whether or not young adults have increased their social media usage is beneficial for each individual; social scientists can also examine the effects that social media has on the human brain, daily functions, perceptions, and neurological understanding.
Limitations
There are four key limitations within this research study. A substantial limitation is the lack of an agreed upon formal definition of social media addiction. There has been an increased interest in studying the effects of excessive social media usage, but a definite scale of SMA has yet to be established. Currently, social media addiction is not included in the DSM-5, limiting this study to available terminology (American Psychiatric Association, n.d.).
Participation bias that may stem from a negative perception of addiction may also limit the results. The negative perception may be internalized by the participants and addiction denial may skew data. The questioning framework and terminology were staged to reduce data collection and analysis errors.
A limitation within this study is the differentiation between social media use for work, school, and personal reasons. Some of the participants are required to engage with social media more than average, which was reflected in their surveys. Survey question 15 was used to help understand which participants used social media for school, work, or both.
Another area of limitation came from only reviewing the social media usage from a user’s smartphone. The evolution of technology has provided a variety of devices on which to access social media. Having these multiple points of accessibility to social media platforms makes it difficult to track usage across multiple devices. For this reason, the research sample is confined to only cell phone users who can access built-in usage statistics for consistent data collection. The researchers took these limitations into account while conducting the research by adjusting and staging questions and limiting data to specific devices.
