SOCIAL INTERNET USE AND SOCIAL ANXIETY AND LONELINESS 1

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1 1 The Correlation Between Social Internet Use and Social Anxiety and Loneliness Jessie Barton Hanover College PSY 344: Social Psychology Winter 2013

2 2 Abstract This study examines the relationship between social internet usage and social anxiety and loneliness. Participants (N= 26; males= 7, females= 19) completed a survey that was designed to determine a) how many hours per week they spend on the internet, particularly on social media and social networking websites and b) how socially anxious and/or lonely they are. Within the survey were two 4 point Likert scales: the Revised UCLA Loneliness Scale and the Social Interaction Anxiety Scale (SIAS), which were averaged together to determine how lonely and socially anxious the participants felt, respectively. Results show that there were no statistically significant correlations between either the Loneliness scores or the SIAS scores with any internet usage. The findings obtained from this study do not support the stereotype of the lonely, socially anxious social media website user.

3 3 The Correlation Between Social Internet Use and Social Anxiety and Loneliness Students on Hanover College s campus use the internet for a variety of purposes. One extremely popular use of the internet among young adults is for social media websites. As of 2010, 72% of young American adults between the ages of 18 and 29 were using at least one social media website (Lenhart, Purcell, Smith, & Zickuhr, 2010). Social media websites are defined as those whose primary function is to provide users with the ability to connect, communicate, and interact with each other online (Correa, Hinsley, & Gil de Zuniga, 2010). In their 2012 article, Wang, Tchernev, and Solloway define social media to include social networking websites such as Facebook and LinkedIn, as well as other websites such as Tumblr and Pinterest. Why would people use social media websites? Baumeister and Leary s 1995 article may provide the answer. In their article, they state that a feeling of social belonging is a fundamental human need. People are likely to form social attachments readily, while being loathe to break them. As pointed out in their article, a need to belong, that is, a need to form and maintain at least a minimum quantity of interpersonal relationships, is innately prepared (and hence nearly universal) among human beings (p. 499). Similarly, overall well being has been found to be fostered by social relationships (Segrin & Taylor, 2007). Thus, individuals could be using these social media websites as an effort to get the social interaction that Baumeister and Leary suggest we all need. For the purposes of this study, social media will be defined as recreational websites where social interactions are most likely to occur. Primarily, this would include social networking websites such as Facebook. On Facebook, users have the ability to communicate with other users via posts to their

4 4 Facebook walls, private messages, etc. Generally, friends on Facebook are individuals whom the user knows in real life, whether they be family, friends, colleagues, or acquaintances. There are other social media websites where this is not always the case. I will also be looking at other social media websites, such as Tumblr, where social interaction is not the primary goal. Social networking and media websites such as these are incredibly popular among college age Americans. Although these websites provide entertainment, can they actually help fulfill the need for social interaction? Research seems to suggest that some forms of social media can. Social networking sites especially seem to provide an easy, instantly accessible way to fulfill the need for social interaction. Facebook use in particular seems to be linked with being comfortable in social situations; in fact, previous studies have suggested that online social disclosure has a positive relationship with social adeptness in face to face situations (Mazer, Murphy & Simonds, 2007; Valkenburg & Peter, 2008) Facebook s format and purpose seem to lend it particularly well to fulfilling the need to belong. On Facebook, it is possible to have friends numbering in the hundreds, even the thousands. Facebook makes it incredibly easy to keep in touch with as many contacts as desired: all an individual has to to do to stay in touch is send a quick message or write on someone s wall. Communication can be done quickly: sending a message only takes as long as it takes the individual to type it. This makes communication, and thus disclosure, very simple. Previous studies have also found a link between social capital and Facebook use (Ellison, Steinfield, & Lampe, 2007). Social capital is the network of social connections that exist between people, and their shared values and norms of behavior, which enable and encourage mutually advantageous social cooperation (Collins English Dictionary). This finding is not surprising. I would

5 5 argue that because Facebook is a friend based site, one has to already have a certain amount of social capital in order to effectively use the website. Usually, the majority of people who appear in an individual s friend list are also people the individual knows in real life, whether they be close friends or acquaintances. Social capital linked with Facebook use may be caused by the number of friends that an individual has outside of the internet; that is, they may have high social capital in real life, which translates to having a large friend list on the website. In their 2006 study, Lampe, Ellison, and Steinfield found that the majority of people using social networking sites are using them to communicate with people they already know, and Correa et al. s findings that people higher in extraversion use social media more frequently would support this idea. Together, these findings suggest that people who use social networking websites may have sufficient social contacts outside of the internet, and so are better able to use the websites. If they have enough contacts in order to effectively use the websites, then they are likely to be getting the social practice, both on the websites and in face to face situations. Therefore, they may be less likely to experience high levels of social anxiety or awkwardness. What of other social media sites, however? What kind of relationship does use of social media sites which do not focus primarily on social interactions have on social anxiety and loneliness levels? Some social media websites, such as Tumblr, are not designed specifically to foster social relationships. There is not necessarily a lot of disclosure on these websites, which means that the sites are not nearly as social as a networking site such as Facebook. While Facebook s main purpose is to connect people, other social media sites have other main purposes and social interaction is secondary. For example, Tumblr s main function is as a blogging website. Users can reblog pictures, music, and text that they like, as well as being able to generate their own content. That is not to say that social interactions do not

6 6 take place on Tumblr at all. Members can contact each other via an ask box and by commenting on each other s posts. Members often band together based on common interests. This can form a sort of community where many members like the same kinds of things, such as a television show, an author, or a band. However, I do not believe that this type of social interaction adequately fulfills the need to belong that is set forth by Baumeister and Leary. Although the users of Tumblr can band together to create what is called a fandom (a group of users who share an interest, such as a love of a particular television show) the main focus of Tumblr is entertainment. Mostly, the presence of other users who have shared interests serves to provide content for an individual to look at and to reblog. This could mean that users of other social media websites, such as Tumblr, may not be getting the kind of social interaction they need to both fulfill the need to belong and to get practice socializing. This could lead to both loneliness and social anxiety. This study seeks to determine what effect extensive social media use has on social anxiety and loneliness. I expect there to be a negative correlation between social networking website usage and social anxiety and loneliness. Conversely, I expect that excessive (15 or more hours a week) social media usage, other than social networking websites, will correlate positively with both social anxiety and loneliness. I expect this because like other activities, successful social interactions require practice. If an individual is not getting a lot of practice in having successful social interactions, they are likely to be more uncomfortable with them than an individual who has had a lot of practice having successful social interactions. To test my hypothesis, I sent out a survey to a convenience sample of Hanover College students. This survey was designed to determine how comfortable individuals are in social situations,

7 7 The research goal with this study is to determine whether there is a correlation between social media usage levels of social anxiety and loneliness. Method Participants 28 Hanover College students participated in this study. These participants are a convenience sample, who were obtained by randomly selecting addresses from the college s student database. 21 were females, and 7 were males. The age range of the participants was 18 22, with an average age of The majority of the participants were White (N=25). There was also one Hispanic participant and two participants of mixed descent. Materials This study relies on the use of an online questionnaire. The questionnaire has four basic demographic questions (gender,age, ethnicity, and year in school), six questions concerning time spent doing activities (ex.: How many hours per week do you spend time with friends, outside of clubs, class, or sports meetings? How many hours per week do you spend using the internet for recreational purposes? How many hours per week do you spend in extracurricular activities, such as work, sports, clubs, etc.?). These questions are designed to determine how much time an individual spends physically with other people as opposed to how much time the individual spends on the internet. The questions are also meant to ascertain how much time an individual spends on social media websites and on social networking websites, as opposed to other websites that are meant to provide entertainment but provide little opportunity for social interaction. I use these initial questions to compare how much time subjects

8 8 spend on the internet (and what they use the internet for) to the answers they give on the subsequent Likert scale questions. Finally, there are 40 questions designed to measure loneliness and social anxiety. The loneliness scale I use in this study is the Revised UCLA Loneliness Scale (Russell, Peplau, & Cutrona, 1980). This scale consists of twenty questions and is designed to measure how lonely an individual feels. They are asked a series of questions, then respond on a 4 point Likert scale in which 1 signifies never and 4 signifies often. I lack companionship is an example of one of the questions, and I feel in tune with the people around me is an example of a question that would be reverse scored. The scale I use to measure social anxiety is the Social Interaction Anxiety Scale, or SIAS (Mattick & Clarke, 1989). I slightly modified this scale to sync more easily with the Revised UCLA Loneliness Scale. I changed the Likert scale that was originally used in the SIAS to a 4 point scale identical to the Revised UCLA Loneliness Scale, in which one signifies never and four signifies often. I did this to maintain consistency through the two scales, so that the transition between them would not be awkward for participants. An example item from this scale is I get nervous when I have to speak with someone in authority (teacher, boss, etc.). An example item that would be reverse scored is I find it easy to make friends my own age. Procedure Before the participants started the survey, they read an informed consent page. Then they filled out the 50 questions of the survey. Finally, the participants read the debriefing form and were thanked for their time via a page they read after the main body of the survey.

9 9 Results In order to run the necessary tests, I took the average of both the subjects loneliness scores and their social anxiety scores, after reverse scoring the appropriate items. This meant that each subject had one score for both the UCLA Revised Loneliness Scale and for the Social Interaction Anxiety Scale, which represented their overall loneliness or social anxiety. After removing items to increase reliability (one item for the Loneliness Scale, seven for the SIAS), both measures were highly reliable. The averaged Loneliness scale scores had a Cronbach s alpha of 0.94; the averaged SIAS scores had a Cronbach s alpha of After I successfully obtained reliable scores for each subject, I ran correlational tests between the Loneliness scores and the SIAS scores and hours per week spent on the following activities: recreational internet use, social media website use, social networking website use, other entertainment website use, time with friends, and time doing extracurricular activities. I included these items in the survey specifically so that they could be run in correlational tests with the Loneliness and SIAS scores. Two subjects were excluded from the testing because their answers were invalid: one of these subjects answers indicated that they spent four hundred hours per week online, which is highly unlikely. The other subject who was excluded also had unrealistically high estimates for how many hours per week they spent doing certain activities. I felt that their answers would only serve as static in the data, and so they were excluded. The only statistically significant correlation was between Loneliness and hours per week spent with friends: r(26)= 0.44, p<0.05. This finding is not surprising at all. It makes complete logical sense

10 10 that a person would be less lonely the more time they spend with their friends. Although they were statistically insignificant, I was particularly interested in the correlations between the Loneliness scores and the SIAS scores and hours per week spent on social networking websites. The correlation between the SIAS scores and hours per week spent on social networking websites was very slightly negative, r(26)= 0.015, p=0.94. The correlation between the Loneliness scores and hours per week spent on social networking websites was much more negative, r(26)= 0.19, p=0.34. The pattern of the results for both of these correlations, although not statistically significant, are heading in the right direction to support my hypothesis, as shown by the figures below. Figure 1. The Correlation Between SIAS Scores and Hours per Week Spent on Social Networking Websites.

11 11 Figure 2. The Correlation Between Revised UCLA Loneliness Scale Scores and Hours per Week Spent on Social Networking Websites. It should be noted that the outliers are not causing the negative correlation: in fact, they are pulling up the line of best fit very slightly. Rather, it is the heavy concentration of high loneliness and social anxiety scores at less than 2.5 hours per week on social networking websites that is causing the negative correlation. I was curious to see if there was any significant difference between the subjects who spent more or less than 2.5 hours per week on social networking websites, so I ran a Welch Two Sample t test. The results of that test showed that there was no significant difference between the levels

12 12 of SIAS scores, p=0.15. However, there was a significant difference between the levels of loneliness scores, t(16)=2.45, p<0.05. These results indicate that people who spend more than 2.5 hours per week on social networking websites have significantly lower loneliness scores than those who do not. Next, I decided to look at correlation between the Loneliness scale scores and the SIAS scores and hours per week spent on social media websites. Once again the correlations were very slightly negative. The correlation between social anxiety and social media usage was r(26)= 0.048, p=0.82. The correlation between loneliness and social media usage was r(26)= 0.13, p=0.52. The negative correlations between social anxiety and loneliness and social media usage does not support my hypothesis: I expected that there would be positive correlations between both social anxiety and loneliness with increased social media usage. The negative correlations are demonstrated by the figures below: Figure 3. The Correlation Between SIAS Scores and Hours per Week Spent on Social Media Websites.

13 13 Figure 4. The Correlation Between Revised UCLA Loneliness Scale Scores and Hours per Week Spent on Social Media Websites. Again, the outliers in the above figures are not what is causing the correlation apparent here: it is the cluster of high loneliness and social anxiety scores that occur in conjunction with low social media usage. To maintain consistency, I once again ran a Welch Two Sample t test between the subjects who spent more than 2.5 hours per week on social media websites and those who did not. The results remained consistent with the first t test in that the difference between the social anxiety scores was not significant (p=0.14), while the difference in the loneliness scores was statistically significant, t(17)=2.91, p< I also ran correlational tests between hours spent on social networking and social media

14 14 websites with the following: hours per week spent with friends, hours per week spent doing extracurricular activities, hours per week spent on recreational internet use, and hours per week spent other entertainment websites. Once again, none of the correlations were significant. However, there were still interesting findings. Both the correlation between social media and social networking and time spent with friends were positive. The correlation between hours per week spent on social networking websites and hours per week spent with friends was r(26)=0.28, p=0.17. The correlation between hours per week spent on social media websites and hours per week spent with friends was r(26)=0.35, p=0.08. Discussion Although there were no significant correlations between any of the factors I looked at in this study, I still had interesting findings. First of all, the correlations between hours spent on social networking websites and loneliness and social anxiety were negative, which, had they been statistically significant, would support my first hypothesis. These results suggest that, in some way, social networking websites do fulfill Baumeister and Leary s Need to Belong, as well as providing practice for social interaction. The low loneliness scores suggest that the need to belong may be at least being partially fulfilled by social networking website usage. There is an alternative explanation, however. The positive correlation between social networking website usage and hours per week spent with friends suggests that the people who are using social networking sites have real life friends that they spend time with outside of the internet: they may merely be using social networking as a tool to maintain those relationships. The negative correlation between loneliness and social anxiety and the hours per week spent on

15 15 social media websites was surprising. Originally, I had thought that social media websites such as Tumblr would not provide adequate social interaction to fulfill the need to belong. However, the results seem to indicate otherwise. Because correlations cannot prove causation, I can only speculate as to what is occurring here. For example, on Tumblr individuals can follow different people, which means that they subscribe to that person s posts. It could be that the participants are following people they interact with in their day to day lives: friends, relatives, etc. If they know the people in real life, they may be more apt to communicate with them via Tumblr posts, or that posts may be directed specifically at them. This would mean that they could be more likely to feel like part of the group. This scenario could also suggest that, because users already know the people they are Tumblr ing with, the need to belong has already been fulfilled. They could interact with these people on a day to day basis, and, much like social networking, could be using the social media to continue an already existent relationship online. The most interesting finding came from the Welch Two Sample t tests that I ran, which found that the participants who spent less than 2.5 hours on social media or social networking websites were significantly more lonely than those who spent more than 2.5 hours on these websites. This could, once again, have something to do with the amount of friends the person has outside of the internet. Both social networking website usage and social media website usage were slightly positively correlated with hours per week spent with friends, which supports Mazer, Murphy & Simonds and Valkenburg and Peter s findings that online social disclosure has a positive relationship with real life social interactions. It could be that the people who are not using either social networking or media websites do not have a lot of real life or online social interactions, and so are more lonely.

16 16 Although neither of my hypotheses were statistically supported, I did find that individuals who spend time using social networking and social media websites are not necessarily lonely, unhappy people. My study had flaws, however. The response rate was extremely low, with only 20 out of 150 people responding. With a higher response rate, my measures could have reached higher statistical significance. With more responses, I also could have had more outliers. If there had been more outliers, it would have been possible to see what effects the extremes of social media and social networking usage have on social anxiety and loneliness. The sample itself could have also been problematic: my participants were both overwhelmingly female and white. It would be interesting to see if the effects of social internet use are any different on males or people of other ethnicities. It would also be interesting to see a study similar to this one that focused on the loneliness and social anxiety of another group of people, such as habitual gamers. Is there any difference between the loneliness and social anxiety scores of people who play single player games versus people who play multi player games with a few other individuals? Is there any difference between either of those groups and people who play huge online role playing games with thousands of other players?

17 17 References Baumeister, R. F., & Leary, M. R. (n.d.). The need to belong: Desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation. (1995).Psychological Bulletin, 117(3), Correa, T., Hinsley, A. W., & Gil de Zúñiga, H. (2010). Who interacts on the Web? The intersection of users personality and social media use. Computers in Human Behavior, 26, Ellison, N. B., Steinfield, C., & Lampe, C. (2007). The benefits of Facebook friends: Social capital and college students use of online social network sites. Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, 12(4), Lampe, C., Ellison, N., & Steinfield, C. (2006). A face(book) in the crowd: Social searching vs. social browsing. In Proceedings of the th anniversary conference on computer supported cooperative work (CSCW 2006) (pp ). New York: ACM Press. Lenhart, A., Purcell, K., Smith, A., & Zickuhr, K. (2010). Social media and young adults. Retrieved from Pew Research Center website: < 2010/Social Media and Young Adults.aspx>. Mattick, R. P., & Clarke, J. C. (1989). Development and validation of measures of social phobia scrutiny fear and social interaction anxiety. Unpublished manuscript. Segrin, C., & Taylor, M. (2007). Positive interpersonal relationships mediate the association between social skills and psychological well being. Personality and Individual Differences, 43, social capital. (n.d.). Collins English Dictionary Complete & Unabridged 10th Edition. Retrieved

18 18 April 09, 2013, from Dictionary.com website: capital Wang, Z., Tchernev, J., & Solloway T. (2012) A dynamic longitudinal examination of social media use, needs, and gratifications among college students. Computers in Human Behavior, 28,