Relations between Social Media Usage and College Students’ Creativity
Loading...
Authors
McGuire, Moira
Baerlocher, Adam
Date of Issue
2025-04-25
Type
Presentation
Language
en_US
Subject Keywords
Other Titles
Abstract
Social media influences diverse aspects of life, from opinions on current events to popular entertainment (Shearer et al., 2024). Creativity underlies problem solving, innovation, communication, and learning which are all necessary aids in human advancement (Khalil et al., 2019). Thus, understanding differences in college students’ creativity based on social media use can provide insights into how thought processes may be affected by social media. Carroll College students will complete the Alternative Uses Task (Guilford, 1967), a divergent thinking assessment as a measure of creative thinking. Participants will be given two minutes to write as many uses as possible for a given object, repeating the process three times. The objects are a shoe, paperclip, and nail file. Students will also self-report on their social media account ownership and usage, including most-used apps, via their phone’s screen time data function. Independent samples t-tests will be conducted to compare creativity scores between students who report social media account ownership and usage and students who do not. If there is not a sufficient sample of social media non-user students, then groups will be created based on time spent using social media apps. It is anticipated that social media’s creativity flexibility (variation in responses), fluency (number of responses generated), and elaboration (response complexity) scores will be higher than those of the non-social media users, but average originality (response novelty) scores will be lower in the social media users compared to the non-social media users, with social media users having higher overall divergent thinking scores.