In The Relations Among Social Media Addiction, Self-Esteem, and Life Satisfaction in University Students, Hawi and Samaha explore, as their title suggests, the relationships between social media addiction, self-esteem, and life satisfaction by surveying university students in Lebanon. Overall, they interpret their results to mean that “independently from culture and gender, there exists a negative relationship between social media addiction and self-esteem and a mediated negative relationship between social media addiction and satisfaction with life.” (p.  8).

Hawi and Samaha had four hypotheses: that there was a zero-order correlation between social media addiction and satisfaction with life, self-esteem mediates the relation between social media addiction and satisfaction with life, there are no gender differences between social media addiction and self-esteem, and that there are no gender differences between social media addiction and satisfaction with life. (p. 3- 4). They used Likert scales with three separate instruments, the SMAQ (Social Media Addiction Questionnaire), Rosenberg’s Self-Esteem scale, and the Satisfaction with Life Scale. Overall, hypothesis 1 was confirmed, which means that with no variables being controlled there was a correlation between social media addiction and life satisfaction overall. Broken down further, “high levels of social media addiction [is] associated with low levels of self-esteem,” and “high levels of self-esteem [is] associated with high levels of satisfaction with life.” (p. 6), which confirms hypothesis 2. However, they found that “social media addiction explained more of the variance in self-esteem of females compared to males,” which contradicts hypothesis 3, in that social media addiction impacts girls’ self-esteem more than it does boys. (p. 7). Finally, hypothesis 4 was confirmed, in that “there are no gender differences between social media addiction and satisfaction with life.” (p. 7).

Overall, it seems like self-esteem is the anchor between both social media addiction and satisfaction with life, which is why they labeled it as a mediating variable. In their conclusion, the authors state that “future studies are needed to keep investigating associations as a weak association [between social media addiction and self-esteem] today might become moderate with time, and a moderate association might become strong with time.” (p. 8). This article is relatively recent (2016), so I wonder if the associations that they identified have increased as projected. Additionally, I am unsure of if they meant that the associations might get worse for an individual over their life, or if they’re indicating that this problem will become more prevalent as a whole over time. Either way, these results point to a problem that needs to be investigated. Who is responsible for fixing it?