International Journal of Data and Network Science (Jan 2023)

Depression and anxiety in social media: Jordan case study

  • Issam AlHadid,
  • Evon M. Abu-Taieh,
  • Rami S. Alkhawaldeh,
  • Sufian Khwaldeh,
  • Ra’ed Masa’deh,
  • Ala’Aldin Alrowwad,
  • Suha Afaneh,
  • Faiza T. Almhai

DOI
https://doi.org/10.5267/j.ijdns.2023.3.025
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 7, no. 3
pp. 1381 – 1396

Abstract

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The expression "social media" refers to a software-based platform developed for users’ benefit. People use it to gain social power, market their products, conduct online business, and share information and ideas. This digital ecosystem has become helpful in various ways, but research indicates that it does not come for free. Addiction, depression, and anxiety are some of the adverse conditions discussed in many studies. The purpose of this study is to mark if there is a relationship between using social media networks and the numbering of people with anxiety or depression. Also, by addressing the need to learn more about what makes people use social networks and how that use affects anxiety and depression in Arabic-speaking users in Jordan, we can help people from different cultures understand each other better. This research uses TAM, telepresence, and survey data from 1050 people, mainly from Jordan. The research looks at how the usage of social media is related to supposed usefulness, supposed ease of use, trust, social influence, age, gender, level of education, marital status, the time spent on the internet, preferred social media network, and perceived usefulness of SNS. AMOS 20 methods of confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), structural equation modeling (SEM), and machine learning (ML), such as SMO, ANN, random forest, and the bagging reduced error pruning tree (RepTree), were used to test the proposed model hypotheses. According to the results, the researchers found high correlations between social network usage and depression and anxiety. The use of social networking sites is also affected by how useful they are seen to be, how easy they are to use, trust, social influence, and telepresence. Also, the moderator's age, gender, level of education, marital status, amount of time spent on the internet, experience with the internet, and favorite social networks all affect how they plan to use social networks.