Social Media and Depression: EMU Students’ Use of Instagram

Extensive use of SNS among positive feelings, may lead to negative feelings such as sadness, jealousy and self-comparison which are taken in this study as depression. Research has shown that spending a good part of the day active on social networking platforms regularly can precipitate feelings of sadness, insecurity, and misery leading to virtual intimidation, inferiority complex, and mediocrity coupled with sleeplessness and feelings of dejection. This research seeks to elaborate on the motives behind an individual’s Instagram interaction; in other words, university students in particular and the benefits they derive from the platform. The study adopts a quantitative methodology in order to answer its research questions. The study randomly samples 372 students of the Eastern Mediterranean University (EMU) in North Cyprus for the 2018/2019 academic session. In-house questionnaires were distributed to the students and were analyzed with using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences. Findings in this study indicated that EMU students obviously derive various forms of satisfaction from their use of Instagram. Findings in this study was also able to show that students get depressed when they get bullied by their online friends, or when they see their friends and other users living a comfortable life based on their Instagram posts. Furthermore, findings also show that social media use may facilitate EMU students who are Instagram users to feel depressed when their followers do not like their pictures, when they do not receive attractive comments about their pictures, or when their followers do not comment on their posts at all.iv Keywords: social media, Instagram, depression, tertiary student, cyberbullying