Compulsive Use of Social Networking Sites Among Secondary School Adolescents in Belgium

Some Internet users fi nd it diffi cult to control the time spent on the Internet, which can lead to a negative impact on school, work and relationships with friends and family. The main goal of the present study was to assess the prevalence of compulsive social networking using the Compulsive Social Networking Scale (CSS) and to determine the profi le of compulsive versus non-compulsive users of SNSs by means of a cross-sectional survey among 1002 Belgian adolescents. The results indicate that respondents had an average score of 0.85 on the CSS (range 0–4). When applying a cut off of 2 and more, this resulted in 7.1 % compulsive users. Results showed that both personality traits (6 %) and psychosocial well- being (7.3 %) explain signifi cant amounts of variance above gender and age. In sum, the block of age and gender together with personality and psychosocial well-being explains 15.8 % of the variance.

"Cecondary school children have an average score of 0.85 on the Compulsive Social Networking Scale (CSS) with a range from 0 to 4. As could be expected compulsive SNS users spent significantly more time on SNSs compared to non-compulsive users, both on school and non-school days. Furthermore, both groups differed with respect to all variables measuring psychosocial well-being. Higher scores were found in the compulsive group for loneliness and depressive feelings, lower scores were found for perceived control and self-esteem. Compulsive respondents gave a significantly lower indication on a scale from 1 to 10 asking how much they liked going to school. Yet, compulsive and non-compulsive users showed no differences when comparing the average score on the personality traits of extraversion, resourcefulness, conscientiousness and emotional stability.