Lebanese Social Media Dependency Scale

Authors

Purpose

The primary objective behind the LSMDS is to provide a culturally valid metric for assessing digital addiction in a non-Western, specifically Lebanese, context. While numerous tools exist to measure internet or social media addiction, they often fail to account for the unique socio-cultural dynamics of the Arab world, and more specifically, Lebanon's distinct trilingual and collectivist environment. Furthermore, Lebanon's recent economic crises have shifted how its population relies on digital communication, making standard international tools potentially less accurate.

This instrument fills a critical methodological gap by offering a tailored assessment for University Students—a demographic highly vulnerable to the academic and psychological detriments of excessive screen time. For clinicians and researchers, having a localized tool ensures that the data collected accurately reflects the population's lived experiences, leading to better-targeted interventions for digital wellbeing and mental health support.

Construct

The psychological construct of Social Media Dependency measured by the LSMDS is conceptualized as a multifaceted Behavioral Addiction. Rather than treating digital dependency as a single monolithic issue, the scale's theoretical framework integrates the physical habit of device usage with the emotional and social drivers of online behavior.

Specifically, the construct is operationalized through three distinct but interrelated dimensions. The first captures the compulsive nature of smartphone use, reflecting the behavioral loop of constant checking. The second dimension taps into the social psychology of the user, focusing on the intense need for peer validation and the fear of social exclusion. Finally, the construct includes a withdrawal component, measuring the psychological distress, anxiety, or irritability that manifests when access to social platforms is restricted.

Validity

To establish the instrument's construct validity, the developers rigorously tested how well the LSMDS aligns with established measures of digital addiction. The scale demonstrated robust convergent validity, showing strong positive correlations with existing tools like the Smartphone Addiction Inventory (r = 0.863) and the Online Fear of Missing Out Inventory (r = 0.888). These high correlation coefficients confirm that the new scale successfully captures the core elements of digital dependency and anxiety about social exclusion.

Additionally, the scale showed a moderate, significant relationship with the Social Media Disorder Scale (r = 0.621). This pattern of correlations is exactly what psychometricians look for: it proves the LSMDS is measuring the intended Behavioral Addiction constructs while still offering a unique, culturally adapted perspective that does not merely duplicate older scales.

Convergent & Discriminant Validation Correlations

Reliability

The internal consistency of the LSMDS is exceptionally strong, indicating that the items reliably measure the same underlying psychological construct. The overall scale achieved a Cronbach's alpha of 0.931, which is well above the standard 0.80 threshold and is generally considered excellent in psychometric evaluation. This suggests a high degree of cohesion among the 27 items without indicating excessive redundancy.

Furthermore, the individual subscales also demonstrated robust reliability, with alpha values ranging from 0.847 to 0.913. This level of internal consistency ensures that researchers and clinicians can confidently use both the total score and the specific subscale scores to make reliable inferences about a student's level of Social Media Dependency, validation seeking, and withdrawal symptoms.

Factor Analysis

The underlying architecture of the scale was determined through exploratory factor analysis utilizing an oblimin rotation, an appropriate choice given that dimensions of Behavioral Addiction are naturally correlated. By applying multiple extraction criteria—including eigenvalue thresholds, scree plot examination, and parallel analysis—the researchers confidently identified a three-factor structure.

This tri-dimensional model accounts for 52.91% of the total variance in the data. The rigorous item reduction process trimmed the initial 55-item pool down to 27 strongly performing questions. Items that failed to load sufficiently onto a single factor (below 0.40) or that showed conceptual overlap were systematically eliminated, resulting in a clean, interpretable factor structure that maps perfectly onto the theoretical dimensions of problematic use, validation seeking, and withdrawal.

Subscales

Instrument

Lebanese Social Media Dependency Scale Items

Sample

The validation sample consisted of 511 University Students recruited across multiple public and private universities in Lebanon. The participants had a mean age of 21.04 years (SD = 3.52), and the majority were female (70.6%), single (97.1%), and unemployed (75.3%).