Social media problematic use, memory concerns, and confidence in young female students from an underrepresented student population

The present study focused on an underrepresented population of female undergraduate students from Saudi Arabia, a society that has only recently given women and men equal rights in education and employment. The country's economic sustainable development plan has made young women's educational attainment a critical constituent of its envisioned success. Yet, social media use among the youth has increased exponentially, leading to concerns. The study examined, through a mixed-methods approach, subject variables that might be differentially linked to academic attainment: social media use (as measured by the Bergen Social Media Addiction scale), self-efficacy (as measured by the General Self-Efficacy questionnaire), prospective and retrospective memory concerns (as measured by the Prospective and Retrospective Memory questionnaire). In regression analyses, problematic use of social media was associated with poor grade point average (GPA). More modestly, GPA decreased with retrospective memory concerns and increased with self-efficacy. Female undergraduate students held ostensibly contradictory beliefs on the relationship between social media usage and academic attainment. They viewed social media tools as useful rather than harmful to academic attainment or memory functioning, and even capable of broadening their self-efficacy. Conversely, they labeled the distractions that social media introduced in their lives as difficult to control. These findings suggest that workshops illustrating evidence of cognitive functioning under conditions of distraction may prevent students from minimizing the costs of problematic social media use.