Assessment of Psychometric Properties of Social Media Addiction Scale

Social media addiction is one of the serious problems in the recent century that numerous scales and questionnaires have been designed to measure it. Considering the strengths and weakness of each tool, it is necessary to have a reliable and valid tool which is compatible with Iranian culture. Therefore, in the present study, Sahin’s questionnaire was translated and its psychometric properties was assessed.

It is a methodological study on 12-18 years old high school students at Sepidan. The questionnaire was translated and re-translated by experts and its psychometric properties were assessed using qualitative and quantitative content and face validity, exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis, McDonald’s omega, Cronbach’s alpha and also test-re-test.

During translation and qualitative face validity, some changes were made in the scale items. The Importance Score of all items were higher than 1.5. But in content validity, the CVI of some items were low that after some revision they changed to 0.7 and higher. In assessing Content Validity Ratio of items, the item number 4 achieved a critical number less than the Lawshe table and was omitted. Therefore 28 items entered in factor analysis. Exploratory factor analysis categorized the items into 4 subdomains and the confirmatory factor analysis confirmed fitness of the model.

Sahin’s social media addiction scale (2018) had a good validity and reliability in the Iranian students and it seems to be an appropriate tool for assessing social media addiction in adolescents.