Development and validation of the Social Media Sites Addiction Scale in Iran (SMSAS-IR)

The lack of a tool to measure social media addiction has hindered the further development of the research field because there are few valid tools to measure this issue, and none of them have been approved in the Persian language. The general purpose of the present study was to construct and standardize the scale of social media networks. In the present study, the combined research method and mixed exploratory design were used as research strategy; The research method was used in the qualitative part, foundational data theory with the Strauss-Corbin systematic approach, and in the quantitative part, the correlational research method of the structural equations type was used. In the qualitative section, the statistical population included families referring to the family court of Tehran province, 32 of whom were purposefully selected and interviewed, and in the quantitative section, it included families living in Tehran province, and in the end, 413 people were selected by sampling method. Several stages were selected. In the analysis of the findings, 89 items were extracted and after checking the face validity, content validity and factor structure, 45 items were confirmed. Finally, the constructed questionnaire included 7 factors, which explains 65.64 percent of the variance. (first factor 23.06%, second factor 12%, third factor 7.16%, fourth factor 6.19%, fifth factor 5.85%, sixth factor 5.46% and seventh factor 5.20%) which indicates Validity of the questionnaire. . The results showed that the constructed scale can be used to assess social media addiction in both clinical and non-clinical settings. In addition, this tool examines the variables that are not examined in the famous scales of addiction to specific virtual platforms.