O-FAQ… Are We All Addicted to Our Friends?!
New study seems to confirm issues with ‘addiction’ classification.
Think about the following question: Are you addicted to your friends?
This might sound like a strange question, but this is a question that we asked — satirically, we should add — in a study that has just been published in Behavior Research Methods.
The origins of this research reach back around 12–18 months, with a chance conversation about the classification of a range of behavioral ‘addictions’ including, among others, Facebook addiction, smartphone addiction, and (at the time, also satirically) selfie addiction. We were looking at some of this research and wondering whether these things actually represented ‘addiction’, or if some people just take normal social interactions to an extreme.
It was then that we started looking at how ‘addict’ was classified. In essence, previous studies had been using a ‘polythetic’ scoring system to label individuals in their samples as ‘addicts’. According to Andreassen et al. (2012), this means that an individual would score at the mid-point or above (i.e., ‘neither agree nor disagree or higher) on at least half of the items on an addiction questionnaire.
On this scale, if you were to say that ten or more of these statements had ‘sometimes’ in the past year, you would be classified as being a ‘Facebook addict’.
This didn’t sit well with us. It felt like scales into ‘problematic social media use’ were applying overly liberal scoring techniques, possibly leading to normal behavior being seen as problematic. We thought that ‘problematic’ Facebook use, for example, could simply be a manifestation of a normal human need for social contact and interaction.
So we started to plan…
We started to assemble a team of like-minded researchers and social scientists (now known as the REDTEAM) who shared similar concerns about the validity of social addiction measurements. To begin with it felt like a bit of a joke, but it soon became a serious study designed to unveil the shortcomings of some established social addition research.
Our approach was simple. Take some Facebook addiction questionnaires, replace ‘Facebook’ with ‘offline friends’, throw in a couple of other questionnaires about personality and risk-taking, and see what happens. Throughout, we would use the established scoring procedures and methodological norms. Everything was pre-registered, we would share our data, and release the preprint on submitting to a journal.
Everything can be found on the Open Science Framework.
Our ‘Offline-Friend Addiction Questionnaire’ (or ‘O-FAQ’) held together relatively well, and was underpinned by three factors:
Social rumination (e.g., “I often think about the times I’ve spent with friends”
Life disruption (e.g., “I have ignored my current/previous partner(s) or family members to spend time with friends”)
Affective reactions (e.g., “I become irritable if I am unable to spend time with friends”)
We confirmed this three-factor structure using a distinct group of participants in our study, and examined scores on the O-FAQ over time (r > .72; which is great!).
The scale was associated with personality traits in the expected directions. ‘Social rumination’ correlated positively with Agreeableness, Neuroticism, and Extraversion, supporting the idea that this factor contains social activity and rumination traits. ‘Life disruption’ was negatively correlated with Conscientiousness (which is associated with rigid planning and productivity), but positively related to Extraversion. And ‘affective reactions’ was positive correlated with the emotional trait of Neuroticism, and negatively correlated with the planful trait of Conscientiousness.
Now… how many offline-friend addicts did we have?
Using the polythetic procedure described above, which is used as a standard procedure in social addiction research, we classified 558 of our 807 participants as being addicted to their offline friends.
That’s an offline-friend addiction prevalence rate of 69%
If we were viewing this through the same lens of other social addiction researchers, we might therefore consider offline-friend addiction a widespread public health crisis. But let’s not do that. Surely there’s another explanation to this…
What we have demonstrated here is that researchers can quickly produce farcical results when conceptualizing social media as a distinctive entity that is unrelated to any other social context. Seeking information from others about their lives or turning to friends when we feel lonely or bored, is to be a social being. Modern technology accelerates these processes, and the wealth of current social media addiction research is confounded by failing to demonstrate how these behaviors are unique or divergent from offline social behavior.
Put simply, online social ‘addiction’ does not take into the normal human striving for social interaction. Without such a norm-based approach to creating cut-off scores for ‘addiction’, researchers risk diagnosing ‘addictions’ on the basis of researcher heuristics about how such questionnaire items should be responded to.
This project clearly is not designed to advocate for creating a diagnosis of ‘friend addiction’. Instead, we hope that the O-FAQ highlights the risks that are inherent in current social media addiction research. We close by appealing to other researchers working in this area to focus on testing what components of social media use are distinct to offline social information, especially when attempting to pathologize such behavior.