Fear of Missing Out as a Predictor of Problematic Social Media Use and Phubbing Behavior among Flemish Adolescents

Vittoria Franchina, Mariek Vanden Abeele, Antonius J. Van Rooij, Gianluca Lo Coco and Lieven De Marez
Additional contact information
Vittoria Franchina: Department of Psychology and Educational Sciences, University of Palermo, 90133 Palermo, Italy
Mariek Vanden Abeele: Tilburg School of Humanities and Digital Sciences, Tilburg University, 5037AB Tilburg, The Netherlands
Antonius J. Van Rooij: imec-mict-UGent, Department of Communication Sciences, Ghent University, 9000 Ghent, Belgium
Gianluca Lo Coco: Department of Psychology and Educational Sciences, University of Palermo, 90133 Palermo, Italy
Lieven De Marez: imec-mict-UGent, Department of Communication Sciences, Ghent University, 9000 Ghent, Belgium

IJERPH, 2018, vol. 15, issue 10, 1-18

Abstract: Fear-of-missing-out (FOMO) refers to feelings of anxiety that arise from the realization that you may be missing out on rewarding experiences that others are having. FOMO can be identified as an intra-personal trait that drives people to stay up to date of what other people are doing, among others on social media platforms. Drawing from the findings of a large-scale survey study among 2663 Flemish teenagers, this study explores the relationships between FOMO, social media use, problematic social media use (PSMU) and phubbing behavior. In line with our expectations, FOMO was a positive predictor of both how frequently teenagers use several social media platforms and of how many platforms they actively use. FOMO was a stronger predictor of the use of social media platforms that are more private (e.g., Facebook, Snapchat) than platforms that are more public in nature (e.g., Twitter, Youtube). FOMO predicted phubbing behavior both directly and indirectly via its relationship with PSMU. These findings support extant research that points towards FOMO as a factor explaining teenagers’ social media use.

Keywords: fear of missing out (FOMO); social media; problematic social media use (PSMU); phubbing; teenagers; adolescents; addiction (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (15)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/15/10/2319/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/15/10/2319/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:15:y:2018:i:10:p:2319-:d:177404

Access Statistics for this article

IJERPH is currently edited by Ms. Jenna Liu

More articles in IJERPH from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().