The Impact Of Social Website Use And Self-disclosure Tendency On College Students’ Materialism

This article aims to explore the relationship between social network use and materialism.Nowadays,the use of social network is an important medium for us to acquire friendships,get information,and even obtain emotional support.A Lot of scholars have made some researches about social network.Social network may affect interpersonal relationships,individuals’ feelings of loneliness and alienation,the individual’s intimacy,and so on.This paper is mainly aimed at college students to make investigations to study whether the use of social network will affect the individual’s materialism.This paper chooses undergraduates and postgraduate students of Jilin University.Questionnaire has been used,SPSS was used for statistical analysis.Some scales have been involved,such as a questionnaire about the intensity of social network use,materialism scales,social comparison scales,self-disclosure scales.We will explore the relations between social network use and materialism,and then get the point whether the mediating role of social comparison and the regulating role of self-disclosure.The results show that the intensity of social network use positively affects the materialistic tendency of individuals when the individual has a high intensity of social network use,the individual tends to be more social comparison,and the higher individual materialism.Social comparison can be divided into ability dimension and perspective dimension.The results show that both the ability dimension and the perspective dimension are conform to this principle.The intensity of social network use positively affects the materialistic tendency of individuals.However,different contents of self-disclosure on social networks also produces different levels of materialism.Self-disclosure plays a role in regulating effect in this process.More Self-disclosure tendency on social network,more social comparison and materialism.Finally,according to the results of the questionnaire analysis,this paper clarified the theoretical contributions on areas of social network,materialism,social comparison,and self-disclosure.At the same time,the limitations of this study are discussed,and the possible future research directions related to this study are presented.