Investigation of social anxiety levels of pre-service teachers using social media by latent profile analysis

This research aims to determine the social anxiety levels of pre-service teachers who use social media using latent profile analysis (LPA) and to reveal whether the covariates (Gender, age, socio-economic status, place of residence, membership durations to social media sites, daily social media usage time, and the number of friends in social media environments) determined in the research are related to profiles. In the descriptive survey study, 249 pre-service teachers formed the study group. The data were obtained using the Social Anxiety Scale for Social Media Users. The social anxiety of pre-service teachers using social media was determined as two profiles: Profile-1 (n = 191; 77%: Low Anxiety) and Profile-2 (n = 58; 23%: High Anxiety). Multinomial logistic regression analysis was performed to determine how covariates differ in profile memberships. As a result of the analysis showed that age, socio-economic status, membership durations to social media sites, daily social media usage times, and the number of friends in social media environments did not differentiate profile memberships. On the other hand, according to gender, it is seen that males experience less social media anxiety than females. In addition, pre-service teachers living in metropolitan cities have less social media anxiety.