Abstract:

This study aimed to investigate the associations between social support, self-esteem, and social media addiction. The participants were 383 (55.09% female) adults aged 18–32 years (M = 21.10, standard deviation = 4.14). Data were collected using the self-report questionnaire. Correlation analysis was conducted to examine the associations between the variables. The Process Macro was employed to investigate the role of selfesteem to explain the relationship between social support and social media addiction. Bootstrap analysis was performed to investigate the significance of the direct and indirect relations between the variables. The findings demonstrated that social media addiction was negatively correlated to both social support and self-esteem, whereas social support was positively correlated to self-esteem. Gender had no significant effect on any of the variables. Even when age and daily hours of social media use were checked as covariates, according to the findings, self-esteem significantly explains how social support and social media addiction are related. Therefore, increased social support and self-esteem may prevent social media addiction.

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