Information and communication technology (ICT) literacy encompasses a range of cognitive abilities that facilitate the effective use of digital techno…

A growing number of self-report measures aim to define interactions with social media in a pathological behavior framework, often using terminology focused on identifying those who are ‘addicted’ to engaging with others online. Specifically, measures of ‘social media addiction’ focus on motivations for online social information seeking, which could relate to motivations for offline social information seeking. However, it could be the case that these same measures could reveal a pattern of friend addiction in general. This study develops the Offline-Friend Addiction Questionnaire (O-FAQ) by re-wording items from highly cited pathological social media use scales to reflect “spending time with friends”. Our methodology for validation follows the current literature precedent in the development of social media ‘addiction’ scales. The O-FAQ had a three-factor solution in an exploratory sample of N = 807 and these factors were stable in a 4-week retest (r = .72 to .86) and was validated against personality traits, and risk-taking behavior, in conceptually plausible directions. Using the same polythetic classification techniques as pathological social media use studies, we were able to classify 69% of our sample as addicted to spending time with their friends. The discussion of our satirical research is a critical reflection on the role of measurement and human sociality in social media research. We question the extent to which connecting with others can be considered an ‘addiction’ and discuss issues concerning the validation of new ‘addiction’ measures without relevant medical constructs. Readers should approach our measure with a level of skepticism that should be afforded to current social media addiction measures.

npj Complexity - The complexity of misinformation extends beyond virus and warfare analogies

In this review, I show how Generative AI (GAI) utterly transforms how we represent, access, expose and cover, find and lose, sanitise and toxify, use …

What impact do people think social media has on their well-being? To answer this question, we adopted a global perspective, analyzing 7.1 million observations from 191,672 users across 182 countries. ...

Preregistering confirmatory research aims at reducing researchers’ degrees of freedom and increasing transparency to ultimately increase replicability. Yet the ...

Can artificial-intelligence (AI) systems, such as large language models (LLMs), replace human participants in behavioral and psychological research? Here, I cri...

Abstract. Scholars from various disciplines study social media. However, neither researchers nor users have a unified understanding of social media. Even m