laurinhe edwardo janyna
Giuseppina Worster
The use of Social Network Sites (SNSs) has grown to become a ubiquitous aspect of daily life in developed countries throughout the world. This rise of social media has resulted in increased public concern regarding the way in which individuals engage with SNSs, and the consequences of frequent SNS use. The Fear of Missing Out (FoMO) is an example of a social psychological phenomenon which has recently received attention as a significant factor associated with experiences of SNS engagement. The following study sought to contribute to developing understandings of SNS use and FoMO. This was achieved by assessing the extent to which FoMO mediated the relationships between SNS engagement and four other psychosocial factors (psychological need satisfaction, social capital, public self-consciousness, and public self-monitoring). Quantitative data were collected from a student volunteer sample of 218 New Zealand SNS users and analysed using a series of regression analyses. Relationships between each of the assessed psychosocial variables and rates of SNS engagement were found to be mediated by FoMO. The findings of this study support the view that FoMO plays an important role in understanding the range of complex and interrelated psychosocial factors relating to rates of SNS engagement.
Ben Classen, BHSc, MA, is a doctoral candidate who is currently based at Victoria University of Wellington, NZ. His research interests include the social psychological impacts of social media use, as well as the formation of social and moral norms in online environments.
Jay K. Wood, Ph.D. is a Senior Lecturer in Psychology in the School of Social Sciences and Public Policy at the Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand. His research explores social influence and the processes underlying social behaviour, as well as social and cognitive bases of the beliefs that we hold.
Patsi Davies, LL.B (Hons), Senior Fellow Higher Education Authority (UK) is a Lecturer in Health Promotion/Public Health in the Department of Public and Environmental Health at the Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand. Her research explores health, human rights, public policy, and law in the context of societies.
Spraggins, A. (2009). Problematic use of online social networking sites for college students: Prevalence, predictors, and association with well-being [Doctoral dissertation, University of Florida]. University of Florida Digital Collections.
Similar to the existing links between social capital and SNS use, there may be reason to suspect an association between social capital and experiences of FoMO. It seems reasonable to presume that the increased social connectivity experienced by individuals with greater social capital may open up more opportunities for feelings of FoMO. More expansive social networks may result in an individual having a greater awareness of social activities they are missing out on, thus resulting in a positive correlation between perceived social capital and experiences of FoMO. Conversely, an increase in social capital could also result in a decreased likelihood of experiencing FoMO. With a more established social network an SNS user may be less prone to experiences of FoMO, as they could conceivably be less likely to feel insecure about missing out on social events. Although previous studies have established positive correlations between FoMO and social factors such as a need for popularity (Beyens et al., 2016), at the time of conducting the present study we found an absence of empirical evidence showing a relationship between FoMO and social capital as a stand-alone social construct.
Additionally, public self-consciousness was also predicted to be correlated with experiences of FoMO. The rationale behind this hypothesis was that individuals who are more conscious of themselves in a public context may have a heightened awareness of missed social opportunities and the consequences of these events in relation to their less socially self-conscious counterparts. Public self-consciousness was therefore analysed in the present study as a psychosocial factor with the potential to be correlated with both SNS engagement and FoMO.
Data was collected via online questionnaire/survey platform surveymonkey.com. Prior to the primary data collection, a small pilot study was conducted in which a group of six volunteers worked through an initial incarnation of the online questionnaire and provided feedback on the clarity of the questions, time taken to completion, and general feedback on their experience completing the questionnaire. This feedback allowed for the correction of minor grammatical inconsistencies in the questions and provided useful information on time taken to completion, an estimate of which was provided to potential participants during recruitment for the primary study.
We collected data from a sample of 218 New Zealand SNS users. Prior to participating, all participants were assured of the ethical considerations taken into account whilst designing the study and were required to provide informed consent for their anonymised data to be used in the study. The final questionnaire included both a quantitative and qualitative component, however the qualitative aspect of this study is beyond the scope of this article. All participants were volunteers and a random small prize draw was utilised to assist in reaching the sample size. Participants were recruited via in class announcements and the distribution of posters and fliers throughout university campuses, resulting in 96.8% of participants being enrolled University students. This non-random sample of students was chosen as the focus of our investigation into psychosocial correlates of SNS use based on typically high rates of SNS engagement within student populations both internationally (Spraggins, 2009; Tang & Koh, 2017), and in New Zealand (Dabner, 2012). A sample size of at least 200 was chosen based on the assumption that this sample would be large enough to detect at least small-to-medium mediation effects using the percentile bootstrap method (Fritz & MacKinnon, 2007). Posters and fliers contained a URL link to the online survey and a QR code which when scanned using a smartphone app, linked the potential participant directly to the online questionnaire. Potential participants were expected to be at least somewhat familiar with QR code/barcode scanning smartphone applications which are widely available on mobile app stores and are increasingly used in contemporary consumer communication and marketing strategies (Cata et al., 2013; Dou & Li, 2008). This recruitment strategy proved highly effective, with 98% of respondents using a QR code to access the online questionnaire.
Participants were asked to confirm that they were users of SNS and indicate which SNS platforms they currently have a profile on. These demographic data were collected in order to provide a greater depth of understanding regarding the particular SNS platforms being frequented by users.
Finally, participants were asked to provide some basic demographic information including their year of birth, gender, and ethnicity. These questions were included to provide more data on the demographic make-up of the sample. After completing these final questions, participants were presented with the opportunity to enter the random prize pool by providing an email address.
73% of participants were aged between nineteen and 23, with the youngest participant aged eighteen and the oldest aged 49. Age was measured as a continuous variable. These demographic data were therefore regressed onto each of the primary variables. A negative correlation was identified between age and public self-monitoring (β = -.14, p = .03) despite more than 70% of participants being aged 22 or younger. This finding is consistent with a general perception of social maturity developing alongside age, with older individuals arguably being less likely to feel the need to monitor and adapt their social behaviour.
Inclusion of gender, ethnicity, and age as covariates had no impact on any subsequent analyses, and therefore these demographic variables will not be discussed with regard to the mediation models below.
Upon completion of the preliminary analysis, data collected from the various psychosocial measures were used to conduct a simple mediation analysis using ordinary least squares path analysis (Hayes, 2018). Indirect effects were evaluated using 95% percentile bootstrap confidence intervals based on 10,000 bootstrap samples. In some cases, a plot of the standardized predicted and residual values indicated mild heteroscedasticity, and therefore analyses were repeated using HC3 (Davidson-MacKinnon) and HC4 (Cribari-Neto) heteroscedasticity-consistent covariance estimators (Hayes & Cai, 2007). These alternatives had no impact on the outcomes, hence the standard inferential method is reported below. Possible alternative models of the assessed variables were checked as part of our analysis. Of the 26 potential models, our ordering of the variables was the only one which resulted in significant and conceptually interpretable indirect relationships for all five predictors, and thus provides the most parsimonious model. All reported coefficients are completely standardized (β).
The relationship between each of the assessed psychosocial variables and frequency of SNS engagement was found to be mediated by FoMO. Individuals with higher rates of online social capital, public self-consciousness, and public self-monitoring, were more likely to experience FoMO, and as a result, more likely to report higher rates of SNS engagement. Such relationships between these variables do not appear to have been identified in any prior literature and may therefore prove an interesting avenue for further exploration. Individuals with lower rates of psychological need satisfaction were more likely to have higher rates of SNS engagement by way of FoMO, a finding which is consistent with previous work in this field. These results support our initial hypotheses that FoMO is a key mechanism in explaining the close association between social connectivity and rates of SNS engagement.
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