The validation of the indonesian version of social anxiety scale for social media users

Departement of Psychology, Faculty of Psychology, Universitas Negeri surabaya, Indonesia

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Abstract

Social media anxiety is an excessive fear of negative evaluation in digital interactions. There is no specific measurement tool for social media anxiety in Indonesia. Therefore, this study validates the Indonesian adaptation of the 21-item Social Anxiety Scale for Social Media Users (SAS-SMU) to address this gap. In this study, a total of 320 participants ranging in age from 18 to 24 years (mean age 21.1 ±1.54; 82.5% female) answered questions in an online survey. The original version of the scale was translated into Indonesian using a back-translation procedure. All participants completed a demographic questionnaire, and the SAS-SMU. The collected response data were analyzed for internal consistency and construct validity. Construct validity was conducted using the item factor analysis (IFA) approach because the response data from Likert ratings were ordinal data with a non-normal distribution. Four dimensions namely Shared Content Anxiety (SCA), Privacy Concern Anxiety (PCA), Interaction Anxiety (IA), Self-Evaluation Anxiety (SEA) which are proven to have moderate-high correlation between dimensions. The original hierarchical model, with four first-order factors and one second order factor had good fit to the data ([X² (185) = 351, p < 0.001; RMSEA = 0.053 (95% CI = 0.044-0.061), p = 0.271; CFI = 0.975; TLI = 0.972; SRMR = 0.057]. Ordinal alpha for internal consistency was found to be 0.93 for the total scale and 0.92, 0.82, 0.92, 0.83 for SCA, PCA, IA, and SEA, respectively. The Indonesian version of SAS-SMU is proven to have acceptable validity, and reliability estimates for use in studies in the field of psychological problems related to social media and online communication.