Social Network Service(SNS) is becoming a new social space online for modern people. Most people use SNS with good experiences, but in recent years, negative problems have emerged by SNS (Andreassen, 2015, Kuss & Griffiths, 2017). To prevent negat...
Social Network Service(SNS) is becoming a new social space online for modern people. Most people use SNS with good experiences, but in recent years, negative problems have emerged by SNS (Andreassen, 2015, Kuss & Griffiths, 2017). To prevent negative problems, it is important to understand which determinants influence on them.
The purpose of this study is to identify the interpersonal and emotional factors that affect SNS addiction tendency and explore methods that can prevent and alleviate SNS addiction tendency. The specific purpose of the study is as follows. First, in order to understand the SNS addiction tendency of adults, which has emerged as a social problem, this study explores the antecedent factors and examines the structural relationship.
This study sets unstable adult Insecure attachment, depression, and fear of missing out (FoMO) as antecedent factors for SNS addiction tendencies and identify causal relationships among them based on structural pathways.
Second, this study discovers factor that can alleviate SNS addiction tendency and empirically verify the moderating effect between the preceding factors and SNS addiction tendency.
For the empirical analysis of this research model, a preliminary survey and a main survey were conducted for SNS users from August 8, 2023 to August 12, 2023. A total of 352 copies were collected, and 350 copies were used for analysis, excluding careless responding.
This study used SPSS 24.0 and Smart PLS 4.0 for data analysis. This study conducted the normality verification process, exploratory factor analysis, confirmatory factor analysis, reliability analysis, measurement model verification, and structural model verification. Then this study verified the significance of hypothesis to identify the relationship between variables, and additionally tested the moderating and mediating effects.
The results of the study were as follows. First, avoidance attachment had a positive effect on depression, but it did not affect FoMO and SNS addiction tendency. Second, it was found that anxiety attachment had a positive effect on depression and FoMO, but did not affect SNS addiction tendency. Third, depressive symptoms had a positive effect on SNS addiction tendency, and similarly, people with high FoMO levels showed a higher tendency to SNS addiction. Fourth, interpersonal Orientation had a moderating effect only between FoMO and SNS addiction tendency.
The implications of this study were as follows. First, this study contributes to the theoretical expansion of the field by showing structurally how unstable adult insecure Attachment is related to SNS addiction tendency. Second, this study expand the extension of the existing research model by presenting a moderating effect that reduces SNS addiction tendency. Third, considering that the recent increase in the proportion of middle-aged people using SNS, this study conducted timely data collection and provide research implications. Fourth, this study suggests that governments, businesses, and education institution and counseling institution need to come up with policies and countermeasure to adult insecure Attachment, depression, and FoMO. Fifth, this study emphasized counseling treatment and prevention measures that can improve interpersonal relationships by confirming that interpersonal problems are the main stressors experienced by many adults.
Keywords: SNS Addiction Tendency, adult insecure Attachment, Interpersonal Orientation, Depression, Fear of Missing Out (FoMO)