Abstract

Background: Social media usage is increasing among adolescents and children, implying that the younger generations spend more time online than ever before. At the same time, previous research has shown that social media affects the well-being of the individuals who use it. This causes an increase in dependency on social media for social interaction and validation. Social behaviour in terms of distress, validation and anxiety is also becoming more prevalent in adolescents. This in turn affects the motivation and usage of social networking systems and individuals' dependency on them. Due to the usage of social networking systems and the characteristics of users changing continuously, heightened levels of anxiety, distress and validation seeking could be factors that affect U&G and the popularity of social networking system platforms in terms of relevance.

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to gain an increased understanding of the motivations and usage of Instagram depending on social behaviours. The aim is to explore the differences between two demographics, University students and Junior High school students. 

Method: For this, a quantitative approach was used, by deploying an online survey. The total number of valid responses gathered was 121. SPSS was used for analysis including data cleaning, descriptive statistics and independent samples t-test to accept or reject the hypothesised relationships between variables. 

Conclusion: The findings of this study provide empirical evidence that the overall attitude towards Instagram differs between the study groups. Social interaction was the most popular U&G motive for both study groups, supporting the theory of Huang and Su (2018). The results show a relationship between social behaviours, usage and motivation, where people with higher levels of agreement of BFNE, SAD and IMS also showed higher and more concentrated levels of usage. A popularity shift towards Tiktok has also been noted in the results, indicating that younger generations do not feel that Instagram is satisfying their U&G.