IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/onl/ajossh/v9y2024i2p38-48id1147.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Is TikTok more addictive than other social media platforms: Perception versus reality

Author

Listed:
  • Jianling Xie
  • Katarzyna Gallo

Abstract

As new social media platforms emerge and the existing ones change in functionality, their impact on students may shift. The current study investigated the number of social media accounts held by college students, and examined the social media platforms students use most, time spent on social media, time spent on schoolwork, and any gender differences in these variables. Additionally, we sought to understand college students’ perceptions of the addictiveness of their major social media platform and detect possible discrepancies between their perception and reality (as measured by time spent on social media daily). A total of 306 participants were recruited from a research university in the U.S. Our results revealed that all participants had multiple active social media accounts (over 5 on average) and spent on average 3.8 hours on social media daily, while spending on average 3.7 hours on schoolwork daily. Interestingly, female participants spend more time on social media than males, as well as spent more time on schoolwork than their male counterparts, suggesting a strategy of compensation. As hypothesized, TikTok was the most popular social media platform, followed by Snapchat, Instagram, and others such as X (formerly Twitter), YouTube, and Facebook. Contrary to popular beliefs, while TikTok-favoring students were more likely to perceive that they were vulnerable to compulsive overconsumption, their time on social media per day was not significantly different from any other social media active users, F(3, 302) = 1.43, p = .23, suggesting a discrepancy between student perception and reality.

Suggested Citation

  • Jianling Xie & Katarzyna Gallo, 2024. "Is TikTok more addictive than other social media platforms: Perception versus reality," American Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities, Online Science Publishing, vol. 9(2), pages 38-48.
  • Handle: RePEc:onl:ajossh:v:9:y:2024:i:2:p:38-48:id:1147
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://onlinesciencepublishing.com/index.php/ajssh/article/view/1147/1613
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:onl:ajossh:v:9:y:2024:i:2:p:38-48:id:1147. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Pacharapa Naka The email address of this maintainer does not seem to be valid anymore. Please ask Pacharapa Naka to update the entry or send us the correct address (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.onlinesciencepublishing.com/index.php/ajssh/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.