Home Environment and Social Media Usage in Adolescents

A home is a place of residence and comfort. It is defined as a place where an individual or a family can rest and be able to store personal property. Home environment refers to those aspects of people’s domestic lives that contribute to their living conditions. These factors may be physical, psychological, social circumstances or due to wider cultural patterns such as location. The aim of the present study is to explore the relationship between home environment on social media usage in adolescents. The snowball sampling method is used to collect the data for the study. The present study consisted sample size of 30 aged between 14-18 years. It is hypothesised that there is no significant relationship between psychological home environment and social media usage. The data was collected using Home Environment Inventory by Dr. Karuna Shankar. No specific scale is available to assess the social media usage of an individual. A Social Media Usage Checklist was developed to assess the duration for which an individual is active on various social media platforms. The intensity of usage was then classified as being mild, moderate or high. Data was analysed on SPSS and correlations between all the domains of home environment and social media usage was found by performing Pearson’s bivariate correlation. A strong correlation of 0.38 was obtained between social media usage and rejection at 0.05 level of significance. The correlation between social media usage and social isolation and protectiveness were found to be 0.54 in both cases significant at the 0.01 level.