The cyber era makes it possible for individuals to interact with others not only face-to-face but also through social media platforms, such as Facebook and Instagram. As of July 2020, there were about four billion active social media users worldwide, with more than half of them involving Facebook. This usage has many advantages and opportunities for individuals to interact with one another any hour of the day and represents a vast source of pleasure. Conversely, problematic use of these forms of communication technology can be viewed as impairing users’ psychosocial functioning and well-being. For instance, some individuals may become engaged in Instagram to an extent that they feel distressed when they are unable to use it during workplace hours. This misuse is widely referred to as social media addiction, which may be considered a contemporary problem of global concern. Consequently, researchers all over the world are conducting studies to evaluate the pervasive nature of this situation. A challenge is that prevalence rates of social media addiction reported in the literature vary dramatically.
A meta-analysis aimed to synthesize the extant research systematically on prevalence is reported in the June 2021 issue of the journal Addictive Behaviors. Subgroup analysis and meta-regression were conducted to investigate whether the prevalence rates would differ by classification schemes, cultural values, and demographic factors. This approach involved 63 independent samples with 34,798 respondents from 32 nations spanning seven world regions. The prevalence estimates varied widely across studies and nations, from as low as 0% to as high as 82%. Nuanced analysis of this diverse body of findings indicates that the prevalence rates can be categorized into three main clusters by the classification scheme used. The first cluster with an overall prevalence of 5% includes studies adopting conservative schemes such as monothetic or strict monothetic classifications. The second with an overall prevalence of 13% includes studies adopting a cutoff for severe level or strict polythetic classifications. The third with an overall prevalence of 25% includes studies adopting relatively lenient cutoff for moderate level or polythetic classifications. The prevalence rate also varied by cultural region.
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