Relationship Between Subjective Happiness and Social Media Usage: Self-Esteem as a Mediator

Abstract

Social media usage has increased over the period of time among adolescents and young adults. There have been incidents where people start subjective comparison of their reality with the reality that has been formed by social media usage. It has been observed by past research that this impacts the self esteem of the person. Keeping this in mind, the present study is trying to explore the relationship between use of social media, self esteem and subjective happiness in young adults. Indian Population was used as a sample through the method of convenience and snowball sampling.  Total sample of 138 adolescents with the age range of 18 to 30 years was considered for this study. English proficiency and absence of clinically diagnosed mental illness was taken as a control variable. It has been hypothesized self esteem would work as the mediator for the relationship between social media usage and subjective happiness. In addition to this the secondary aim was to understand the relationship between subjective happiness. The data was collected through google form.  Mediation analysis and correlations were used in order to analyse the result. Results showed that there is a negative relationship between social media usage and subjective happiness. Analysing the relationship further with the help of mediation analysis it was observed that there is no direct relationship between social media usage and subjective happiness but there was an indirect relationship that was found between social media usage and subjective happiness.