Problematic attachment to social media: Five behavioural archetypes

Today, social media play an important role in people’s daily lives. Many people use social media to satisfy their personal and social needs, such as enhancing self-image, acquiring self-esteem, and gaining popularity. However, when social media are used obsessively and excessively, behavioural addiction symptoms can occur, leading to negative impacts on one’s life, which is defined as a problematic attachment to social media. Research suggests that tools can be provided to assist the change of problematic attachment behaviour, but it remains unclear how such tools should be designed and personalised to meet individual needs and profiles. This study makes the first attempt to tackle this problem by developing five behavioural archetypes, characterising how social media users differ in their problematic attachments to them. The archetypes are meant to facilitate effective ideation, creativity, and communication during the design process and helping the elicitation and customisation of the variability in the requirements and design of behaviour change tools for combatting problematic usage of social media. This was achieved by using a four-phase qualitative study where the diary study method was considered at the initial stage, and also the refinement and confirmation stage, to enhance ecological validity.