Explaining the Effect of Virtual Social Networks on Youth Lifestyle(Case: Ardabil Youth)

Information and communication technologies have influenced all social, organizational and individual spaces in human societies and have affected people's daily lifestyle, work and knowledge to different degrees. The study examined the relationship between the use of virtual social networks and youth lifestyles. This research is applied in terms of purpose and descriptive-correlational in terms of research method. The statistical population consisted of the youth between the ages of 18-25 in Ardabil in 2017, which was 24,000 people. And 380 samples were selected using Morgan table by multi-stage cluster sampling method. Data were collected using the Ariani et al. (2015) social media questionnaire and the La'ali et al. (2012) youth lifestyle questionnaire. The results showed that there was a significant inverse relationship between virtual networks and youth lifestyles (physical health, exercising and health, weight and nutrition, disease prevention, psychological health, spiritual health, social health, drug avoidance and accident prevention). The regression results also showed that the social network variable predicts about 40% of lifestyle variance.