The mediating role of social media addiction and social media fatigue in explaining the relationship between online social support, fear of missing out and social anxiety disorder symptom level

The research aims to explain the mediating role of social media addiction and social media fatigue while defining the relationship between fear of missing out and social anxiety perceived by individuals from online interactions. The research consists of two stages. The first stage of the study consists of validity and reliability studies of two scales. In this context, the adaptation study of the Social Media Fatigue Scale which originally developed by Maier et al. (2012) to measure social media fatigue was conducted. In addition Social Support from Online Interactions Scale was developed to measure perceived social support from social media interactions. The data were collected through the Social Support from of Online Interactions Scale, Social Media Addiction Scale, Social Media Fatigue Scale, Multidimensional Perceived Social Support Scale and Brief Symptom Inventory. The first stage of the study was conducted with 185 participant data. According to the validity and reliability studies, Social Media Fatigue Scale is 5-dimensional (Social Overload, Emotional Fatigue, Aggressiveness, Satisfaction and Use), and Social Support from Online Interactions Scale is 4-dimensional (Satisfaction, Coping with Difficulties, Emotional Support and Direct Communication). According to the correlation findings, both scales had a significant relationship with scales other than the Multidimensional Social Support Scale. In the second stage of the study, a model trying to explain social anxiety disorder with variables related to social media was proposed and tested. For this purpose, data were collected from the participants through Fear of Missing Out Scale, the Social Support from Online Interactions Scale, Social Media Addiction Scale, Social Media Fatigue Scale and Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale. According to the regression analysis conducted with 240 participants' data, the stages which consist of fear of missing out, social support from online interactions, social media addiction and social media fatigue predicted social anxiety disorder. When the proposed structural equation model analyzes were conducted, it was seen that the fear of missing out predicted social anxiety disorder through social media addiction and social media fatigue. Social support from online interactions predicts social anxiety disorder through social media fatigue. In the proposed alternative model, the relationship between fear of missing out, social support from online interactions and social anxiety disorder was defined by the predictive effect of social media addiction on social media fatigue. In the analysis of the alternative model, all relationships identified were significant. According to the alternative model, as social support from online interactions and fear of missing out increases, individuals' tendency towards social media addiction increases and this increase increases social media fatigue and feeds social anxiety disorder. Keywords: fear of missing out, social support from online interactions, social media addiction, social media fatigue, social anxiety disorder