Investigating the impact of mobile SNS addiction on individual’s self-rated health

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate how WeChat addiction influences users’ physical, mental, and social health. Design/methodology/approach A national survey was conducted in China. A total of 1,058 responses were collected from 31 regions of China. Findings The regression results show that WeChat addiction is negatively associated with users’ physical, mental, and social health. The negative effects are significant even after adjusting for the effects of the Big Five personality traits, years of using WeChat, and demographic variables such as age, gender, education level, and monthly income. Years of using WeChat is not significantly related to users’ health. It is also found that the influence of WeChat addiction on health outcomes is sensitive to years of WeChat use. The influence is dormant when users have less than three years of WeChat usage, but starts to exhibit itself after three years. Research limitations/implications Addictive use of WeChat is associated with declining overall health among Chinese users. Given the cross-sectional nature of this study, definite causal relationship between WeChat addiction and health deterioration cannot be established. Controlled experiments are needed to further examine the causal effects of WeChat addiction. Originality/value WeChat is the most popular mobile social network service (SNS) in China, but its comprehensive impact on users’ health is rarely studied. This paper extends the extant research on SNS addiction by providing a deepened understanding of how mobile SNS addiction affects personal health in the unique context of WeChat, which provides an important contribution to the interdisciplinary research in public health, psychology, and information systems.

Is it meaningful to distinguish between Facebook addiction and social networking sites addiction? Psychometric analysis of Facebook addiction and social networking sites addiction scales

“…The results showed that SNS addiction was positively associated with perceived stress and negatively associated with general subjective well-being even after controlling for Facebook addiction and other studied variables, which is congruent with previous studies (H4 and H6 substantiated; Hou et al 2017;Marino et al 2018b;Pontes 2017;Tromholt 2016;Turel et al 2018;Xue et al 2018). Facebook addiction showed a similar relationship with these variables before controlling for SNS addiction.…”

“…Hormes et al (2014) reported that Facebook addiction is related to emotional regulation deficits and susceptibility to both substance and non-substance addiction. Addictive use of WeChat has been found to be negatively associated with users' physical, mental and social health beyond personality traits and demographic variables (Xue et al 2018). Previous studies have also suggest that both typical and excessive SNS users experience reduction in perceived stress and improvement in well-being following SNS abstinence of several days.…”

Understanding massively multiplayer online role‐playing game addiction: A hedonic management perspective

“…In response to the call for information systems (IS) research on the dark side of technology use (Tarafdar, Gupta, & Turel, 2015), research on technology addiction has grown steadily in the IS discipline. Most technology addiction studies have been conducted in the context of hedonic technologies, with social networking sites and online games being the most popular research foci (eg, Gong, Zhang, Cheung, Chen, & Lee, 2019;Hyun et al, 2015;Xu, Turel, & Yuan, 2012;Xue et al, 2018). One possible reason for the increasing scholarly attention to online gaming addiction is that more individuals are spending time on online leisure activities every day.…”

Social network sites, fear of missing out, and psychosocial correlates

“…A key factor contributing to these changes to daily life is the rate at which individuals are using SNSs. With frequency and intensity of engagement with SNSs being consistently associated with the health and wellbeing of users (Frost & Rickwood, 2017;Sherlock & Wagstaff, 2018), high rates of SNS engagement (Qutteina et al, 2019;Shimoga et al, 2019), and the closely related phenomenon of problematic or pathological use of SNS (Hawi & Samaha, 2017;Holmgren & Coyne, 2017;Oberst et al, 2017;Xue et al, 2018), are increasingly being considered as prevalent public health concerns throughout the modern world. There is therefore considerable practical interest in understanding how and why people are engaging with SNS technologies.…”