Patterns of social media platforms co-use and social media addiction among secondary school students: findings from Thailand’s fifth national school students survey with latent class analysis
Child And Adolescent Mental Health
Patterns of social media platforms co-use and social media addiction among secondary school students: findings from Thailand’s fifth national school students survey with latent class analysis
Child And Adolescent Mental Health

Patterns of social media platforms co-use and social media addiction among secondary school students: findings from Thailand’s fifth national school students survey with latent class analysis

Int J Adolesc Med Health. 2025 Nov 26. doi: 10.1515/ijamh-2025-0163. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

OBJECTIVES: Adolescents generally use social media in groups of applications or platforms with a latent pattern. As neurobiological studies suggest that social media platforms stimulate the brain in diverse ways, we hypothesize that certain social media use patterns may be more prone to addiction than others. The objectives of this study are: 1) to describe patterns of social media platform co-use among school-going adolescents in Thailand, and; 2) to describe the extent to which social media co-use patterns are associated with social media addiction.

METHODS: We conducted a nationally representative cross-sectional study among 23,659 secondary school students from 113 schools across Thailand between November 2020 and March 2021. We asked participants to self-report the social media applications and platforms that they had used in the past 12 months. We used latent class analysis (LCA) to identify social media usage patterns, and assessed the patterns’ association with social media addiction scores using multivariable linear regression.

RESULTS: Among our participants, 86.1 % had used social media within the past 30 days. Facebook was the most commonly used platform, followed by YouTube and Line. We identified two distinct social media use patterns: 1) Common use of Line, Facebook, and YouTube (“Basic Combo”); 2) Basic Combo with other platforms such as Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram (“Basic Combo Plus”). The “Basic Combo Plus” pattern participants exhibited higher levels of withdrawal, persistence, and escapism in social media use compared to the “Basic Combo” pattern participants (all p-value < 0.05).

CONCLUSIONS: The number of social media platforms correlates with social media addiction level. However, limited generalizability, the lack of detail regarding social media use, and potential information bias should be considered as caveats in the interpretation of the study findings.

PMID:41292161 | DOI:10.1515/ijamh-2025-0163