Students addiction to online social networks: a study in the Latin American context

Abstract

The online social networks (OSN) have meant a transformation in the way of communicating and relating with people, and have reached a certain presence in the educational field, being used as an environment for collaborative work, alternative means of communication, learning of languages, platform or LMS for virtual training, and for tutoring and advising students. Adolescents and young people handle the OSN as preferred means for their communication and interaction, to extend their relationships, to locate and demand information, as an element of fun, as a means of coexistence and for the creation of new communication languages. For all these actions, the purpose of our study is to know and analyze the degree of addiction that young people and adolescents from different Latin American countries have towards OSN. For this, the scale of Sahin (2018) called “Social Media Addiction Scale-Student Form” (SMAS-SF) was adapted and was answered by 3223 young people from Chile, Colombia, Spain, Mexico, Peru and the Dominican Republic. As results obtained, significant differences are observed among young people and adolescents from the different countries surveyed, and they also show strong signs that in their opinion they are not addicted to them.