Psychometric adaptation of the Questionnaire of Social Networking Addiction in a sample of Salvadoran adults

Abstract

This article aims to prove if the Social Media Addiction Scale (SMAS) has adequate validity and reliability indexes in the Salvadoran context. This is an instrumental study with a transversal and retrospective design. A total of 300 Salvadoran adults were evaluated via a non-probabilistic, nonintentional sampling. The median age was 29.15 years old, with a standard deviation of 7.77. In women, this was 28.75 years old, and in men, 29.81 years old. A digital survey was used to collect data. The findings revealed that SMAS has adquate validity indexes in its structure, criteria and reliability to be used in the Salvadoran context; also, the inferential analysis proved that there are statistical differences in relation to age, place of residency, the number of hours dedicated to social media and the amount of social networks they use.