Adaptation of Social Media Rumination Scale into Turkish and Its Association with Social Media Anxiety

The common usage of social media has raised some concerns over the psychological well-being of users in recent years. Thus, examining the role of social media use on the well-being of individuals has gained more importance. The goal of the present study is two-sided. Firstly, it aims to investigate the psychometric properties of the Turkish version of the Social Media Rumination Scale. Secondly, it aims to test the link between social media anxiety and social media rumination, which are two psychological phenomena observed in social media. This study was conducted with 467 university students (female 69%, Mage = 21.90, and SD = 2.88). Confirmatory Factor Analysis confirmed the single-factor model of the Social Media Rumination Scale; however, one item was eliminated due to the poor loading of this item to the factor (Item 10). Moreover, only the shared content anxiety, one of the subscales of the Social Anxiety Scale for Social Media Users, predicted social media rumination controlling for gender and the average social media use duration. Given the limited research to measure rumination and anxiety with specially designed tools in social media contexts, this study provided the first direct evidence that social media rumination is related to social media anxiety.