Investigation of the relationship between social media users' social anxiety and communication competencies of high school students

Social anxiety is the most common manifestation of speaking within the community and avoiding eating in crowded places. Adolescents and children with social phobia; They have difficulty in speaking in class, writing on blackboard, communicating with others, eating in crowded places, using school sink. As a result of all these anxiety and fears, the feeling of boredom, constant tension and restlessness becomes a part of child development. In fact, fear and anxiety are the emotions necessary for the survival of people. The distinction: the feeling felt in the face of a real and known danger can be called fear,anxiet is the feeling felt when the danger is not fully known.The aim of this research is to investigate the relationship between social anxiety level and social competency status. The research sample consisted of 250 high school students randomly selected from a private school in Şişli, İstanbul. The research data were collected by using two scales together with the demographic questions prepared by the researcher: 'Social Anxiety for Social Media Users Scale'developed by the researchers (Alkis, Kadirhan, & Sat, 2017) and the 'Communication Competency Scale'which developed by ( Wiemann,1977) and the reliability and validity study was performed by(Erigüç & Koca, 2017). SPSS program was used to analyze the data. T-test, Anova and Regression Analysis were used to test the research hypotheses. Data were evaluated at 95% confidence interval and 5% significance level.