Abstract:

This study aimed at examining the mediating effect of social media addiction on the relationship between leisure boredom and loneliness. A total of 330 high school students in Istanbul, 212 male (64.2%) and 118 female (35.8%), participated in the study voluntarily. In the study, the "Leisure Boredom Scale" developed by Iso-Ahola and Weissinger (1990) to measure participants' perceptions of boredom in their leisure, the "UCLA Loneliness Scale" developed by Peplau and Cutrona (1980) to measure loneliness level, and the "Social Media Addiction scale for Adolescents" developed by Eijnden, Lemmens and Valkenburg (2016) to measure the social media addiction level, were used as data collection tools. The convenience sampling method, which is one of the random sampling methods, was used in the sample selection and the face-to-face survey technique was preferred. In the analysis of the obtained data, descriptive statistics via the SPSS package program, Pearson Correlation, and regression analysis of the indirect impact approach based on the Bootstrap method via PROCESS v3.5 macro were performed. As a result, it was observed that leisure boredom had statistically significant effects on social media addiction and loneliness, and social media addiction on loneliness. Besides, regarding the main objective of the research, it was determined that social media addiction had a mediating effect on the relationship between leisure boredom and loneliness.

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