Materialism, Happiness and Social Media Addiction among Adolescents

Social media use among youngsters is on the rise. More and more people are using social media to connect with each other socially, to share information and to express views. Increased use of social media exposes them to many advertisements and posts by friends and acquaintances of their various achievements and acquisitions of material goods. This kind of exposure may lead to an urge for owning and acquiring more material goods and achieving life goals. The study examined the relationship between social media addiction, happiness and materialism among high school and college students. The study also investigated if there were any gender differences in social media addiction, happiness and materialism among students. 200 high school and college students from two schools and two colleges in Chennai city completed the Oxford Happiness Questionnaire -OHQ (Argyle & Hills, 2002), the Bergen Social Media Addiction (BSMAS; Andreassen et al, 2012) and Material Values Scale Short form (Richins,2004). Pearson’s correlation coefficient was used to investigate the relationships between variables. Independent samples t-test was computed to examine gender difference in the three variables. The analysis revealed that social media addiction was significantly, negatively correlated with happiness and significantly, positively correlated with materialism among students. Among female students social media addiction was significantly, negatively correlated with happiness and significantly, positively correlated with materialism. There was no significant relationship between happiness and materialism among female students. Among male students social media addiction was significantly, negatively correlated with happiness. The relationship between social media addiction and materialism was non-significant. Materialism was significantly, negatively correlated with happiness. There were no significant gender differences in social media addiction, happiness and materialism.