Gender Differences in Digital Well-being and Human Values: A Social Media Perspective

Description

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20490510

Sunita Kanwar and Monica Sharma (Department of Psychology, IIS (deemed to be University), Jaipur, Rajasthan)

Social media has become a key platform through which adolescents express cultural values, satisfy psychological needs, and engage in prosocial behaviour. This study examines gender differences in social media usage and evaluates whether these behaviours align with adolescents’ human values, psychological needs, and digital well-being.The sample consisted of 200 adolescents selected from different schools. Data were collected using five standardized instruments: the Social Networking Usage Questionnaire (Bashir & Gupta, 2018), Human Values Scale (Dilmac, 2007), Basic Psychological Need Satisfaction Scale (LaGuardia, 2000), Pro-Behavioral Intentions Scale (Baumsteiger & Siegal, 2018), and the Digital Well-being Scale (Arslankara et al., 2022). Independent sample t-tests were conducted to examine gender differences. The findings revealed significant gender differences across several dimensions. Female participants reported higher academic use (t = 2.58, p = 0.01) and social use (t = 2.00, p = 0.04) of social networks. They also scored significantly higher on responsibility, peacefulness, respectfulness, tolerance, prosocial behaviour, and safe and responsible online behaviour. However, no significant gender differences were observed in entertainment use, informativeness, friendship, honesty, autonomy, competence, relatedness, digital satisfaction, or overall digital well-being. he results suggest that female adolescents tend to engage in more academically oriented, responsible, and prosocial social media use compared to males, while both genders report comparable levels of digital well-being.