SOCIAL MEDIA DEPENDENCY, BODY IMAGE SATISFACTION, AND MENTAL WELLBEING AMONG PAKISTANI UNIVERSITY STUDENTS: A MULTIDIMENSIONAL ANALYSIS

Abstract

The blistering adoption of the social media in daily life has transformed the identity, self-presentation as well as peer interaction of the young adults. The paper explored the interactions between social media addiction, satisfaction with body images, and mental health among Pakistani university students in a theory-oriented approach of multidimension. The quantitative correlational design was used and a purposive sample of 180 students (aged 1825 years) in a private university at Lahore was used. The participants took the Social Media Addiction Scale Student Form (SMAS-SF), the Body Self Image Questionnaire (BSIQ) and the Warwick Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale (WEMWBS). It was found that there were considerable positive relationships between social media dependency and body image satisfaction (r =.24, p <.01), along with social media dependency and mental wellbeing (r =.19, p <.01). Nevertheless, the relationship between overall satisfaction with body image and mental wellbeing was not significant. Regression analyses indicated that social media dependency was a significant predictor of both body image satisfaction (R 2 =.05) and mental wellbeing (R 2 =.03), but the effect sizes were low. There were gender variations in social media dependency among the females and health fitness impact among the males. In sharp contrast to largely deficit oriented narratives, evidence indicates that social media use can be a situational accomplishment of personal expression, social identification as well as identity affirmation. The article adds culturally-based data to Pakistan, and results in the necessity to develop reciprocated views that distinguish between adaptive dependency and a valuable online experience.