Social media addiction: Applying the DEMATEL approach

•Experts’ perspective towards the predictors of social media addiction were examined.•The predictors were evaluated using the DEMATEL method approach.•Personality was identified as the most important dimension impacting addiction.•Openness, loneliness, and depression were the most important predictors. While there is a growing number of studies investigating the determinants of social media addiction, there is a lack of research on examining the importance of such predictors and their inter-correlations and inter-dependences from psychotherapists’ and researchers’ point of views. Hence, utilizing the “Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL)” technique, the current study investigated the clinical importance of social media addiction from the perspective of researchers and psychotherapists. Accordingly, by reviewing the literature 15 distal predictors of social media addiction were extracted and further classified into three groups of personality factors, comorbid symptoms, and psychosocial factors. From the data collected from 35 respondents, the results highlighted the group of personality factors as the most important dimension increasing the risk for developing social media addiction from the respondents’ perspective. Moreover, the DEMATEL results revealed the predictors of openness to experience (personality dimension), loneliness (psychosocial), and depression (comorbid) as the most important predictors of social media addiction within each group. The results and implications of the study are discussed.