Social media addiction among youth: a gender comparison

Digital technology has brought forward the social media as a prime source to make global connections. Involvement with the electronic services creates an interactive platform for the users which makes communication, sharing ideas, discussing issues easier. Networks framed through social media have been found helpful to improve the connections as well as degrade the relations with self. The two genders male and females are similar in the number of aspects, but there seems a robust deviation that includes multiple facets of social interactions which suggest the existence of inherent behavioural differences. Nevertheless, there are contradictions about the influence of gender and social media use; some studies indicate higher addiction in male while some highlights addiction more in females. At the same time, gender roles on social networking sites mirror the expectations of the societies that the users represent. Thus, the preferences of the males and females vary in context to social media. The present study aimed to see the prevalence of social media addiction among the youth and to see the gender differences in social media addiction. The present study was a cross-sectional survey design conducted among college-going youth (160 male and 321 female). Purposive sampling technique was used to select the students from different colleges of Guwahati, Assam. Four hundred eighty-one students were randomly selected from the different colleges of Kamrup Metropolis. Semi-Structured tool and Bergen’s Social Media Addiction were administered. Descriptive analysis in the present study shows the prevalence of social media addiction among 31.6 percent of the participants. The study highlights the significant difference in social media addiction between both male and female participants (Mean rank= 216.29 and Mean rank= 253.32) respectively and p value= .001. There is a need to control the use of social networking sites and aware them about the threats of these tools. Allocating research knowledge about the positive and negative applications of social media at the individual level, social as well as academic levels can be beneficial.  The multimodal treatment approach to deal with social media addiction among youth also can be useful.