Between social media addiction and self-respect of university students examination of the relationship

Introduction: Nowadays, internet usage is very common. Internet usage is mostly preferred in the field of social media. Social media is used in many different areas like education, news, socialness, knowledge acquisition, making friends. This study is projected to find out the relationship between social media addiction levels and self esteem by emphasizing the usage of social media in university students. Self-esteem categories of university students were approached as social media addiction profiles and the results of field study on university students were discussed in this context. Aim: The aim of this study is to determine the rates of social media addiction in university students and examine the effects of social media usage on self-esteem based on the hypothesis of that social media usage negatively affects self-esteem. There are limited studies that examine the relationship between social media addiction and self esteem. In this context, it is thought that the research will fill the gap in the literature and will be a resource for other studies. The results of the study will contribute to developing suitable intervention methods. Method: Our research is descriptive, cross-sectional type of research. University students who were chosen randomly constitute our study universe. It is planned that to deliver and apply the surveys via the internet because of pandemic. The survey form was improved by the researcher, taking as similar researches which conducted in the past as a result of literature review related to the subject. Oral and written explanations were given to participants about the purpose and scope of the research and the volunteers have included the research. Findings: According to findings obtained as a result of research there is a statistically significant, positive, low-level correlation between the social media addiction scores of students who participate in the study and the self-esteem total scores Looking at the demographic variables of the participants, female participants had higher participate than male participants. Age variables of social media addiction decrease as their total scores increase. It shows that the younger university students have more social media addiction. It is detected that social media addiction increases IV as the time spent on social media increases. It was concluded that as the time the university students spent on social media increased their self-esteem is meaningfully low. Result: According to the results of our research, as usage of social media on university students increased the self-esteem decreases. Considering the gender variables, it was concluded that as the usage of social media increases in females compared to males, self-esteem decreases.