Social Networking Sites - Addiction Test (SNS-AT)

Sep 14, 2024·
Dr. Halley Pontes
Dr. Halley Pontes
· 2 min read

The Social Networking Sites - Addiction Test (SNS-AT) (Montag, Müller, Pontes et al., 2023) was developed to provide a brief and convenient psychometric assessment framework for Social Media Addiction according to the widely supported components model of addiction (Griffiths, 2005) that includes salience, tolerance, mood modification, relapse, withdrawal, and conflict in line with current diagnostic criteria for addictive behaviors. The SNS-AT was also developed with the intent to provide a more current and revised assessment of Social Media Addiction by providing additional improvements to the wording and content of existing similar tools.

At the psychometric level, the SNS-AT has been found to be reliable and to offer a unidimensional factor structure for the measurement of Social Media Addiction via 6 items that capture the key symptoms of Social Media Addiction as reported in the literature. The SNS-AT was originally developed in a sample of 1,151 individuals (about 50% males and 50% females, with a large age range, starting with 18 years).

The SNS-AT has been shown to exhibit adequate psychometric validity in the initial study assessing its factorial validity via Confirmatory Factor Analysis (see Montag, Müller, Pontes et al., 2023)

The SNS-AT is freely available to any interested individual and is particularly suitable to both time- and resource-limited research on social media use behavior. Future studies using clinical samples, longitudinal, and cross-cultural designs are necessary to further consolidate the initial psychometric validation findings reported in the original study. Languages in which the test has been developed and/or translated to so far include:

If you know of any other existing validation study and/or if you wish to further develop and validate the SNS-AT in another language, please do get in touch with me via email.