The Contribution of Attachment and Social Media Practices to Relationship Development

Abstract

This study tested the hypothesized directional relationship that college students (N = 717; 10.1% response rate to an online survey) who score higher on measures of insecure attachment and social media practices would have lower relationship development quality scores. Structural equation modeling results indicated that participants with greater insecure attachment had lower relationship development quality (large effect size), whereas individuals with greater social media practices had higher relationship development quality scores. Implications for counselors are presented.

Attachment style moderates the relationship between social media use and user mental health and wellbeing

“…Although we cannot infer from the current study if problematic SNS use is on the whole a cause of problematic wellbeing and mental health, the findings are useful to predict individuals who could be most at risk. The current findings can be generalised to convey that attachment style serves social skills similarly online as it does offline and that individuals with certain social orientations will be more drawn to using social media than others and for different intentions (Sherrell and Lambie, 2018). Current findings are useful to identify that avoidantly-attached individuals are likely to turn to social media to alleviate unwanted distress; however, they seem unlikely to benefit from doing so and, as highlighted in the current study, can suffer from decreasing levels of wellbeing as a result.…”

Advancing the Counseling Profession by Examining Relationships Between Variables

“…SEM is a confirmatory procedure that is a combination of multiple regression, path analysis, and confirmatory factor analysis (Schumacker & Lomax, 2016;Ullman, 2007), and it can be used in experimental and nonexperimental designs but is most often used in correlational studies (Ullman, 2007). For example, Sherrell and Lambie (2018) applied SEM to examine the contribution of college students' attachment styles and social media practices to their relationship development. Unlike multiple regression, SEM allows an investigator to test proposed theoretical models that are supported by the literature and provides directionality of relationships for more complex models involving multiple independent and dependent variables in a causal framework (Graziano & Raulin, 2013;Ullman, 2007).…”

Social media intensity and first-year college students’ academic self-efficacy in Flanders and the United States

“…The Facebook Intensity scale (FBI; Ellison et al, 2007) was used to measure social media intensity after participants indicated whether they had a Facebook account (see Table 1). The FBI has been used in a wide variety of contexts, such as studies on exercise motivation (Devine, Watson, Baker, & Hall, 2019), relational development (Sherrell & Lambie, 2018), and life satisfaction (Zhan, Sun, Wang, & Zhang, 2016). The scale includes six centrality items that are measured on 7-point Likert-type scale with anchors ranging from strongly disagree (1) to strongly agree (7).…”