Family harmony, emotion-management skills, problematic social media use and individual social responsibility: testing a serial mediation model.

BACKGROUND

Family harmony, emotion-management skills, problematic social media use and individual social responsibility are relevant to young adults' psychosocial functioning, but evidence on their interrelations remains limited, particularly in Turkish samples.

AIMS: This study examined whether emotion-management skills and problematic or dysregulated social media use statistically mediated the association between family harmony and individual social responsibility among Turkish young adults.

METHOD: A cross-sectional online survey was completed by 854 participants (64.1% female) using the Individual Social Responsibility Scale, Family Harmony Scale, Emotion-Management Skills Scale and the Bergen Social Media Addiction Scale, interpreted here as an indicator of problematic or dysregulated social media use symptoms.

RESULTS

Family harmony showed a significant total association with individual social responsibility (B = 0.77, 95% CI 0.64 to 0.89) and remained directly associated after the mediators were included (B = 0.60, 95% CI 0.47 to 0.72). The total indirect effect was significant (B = 0.17, 95% CI 0.13 to 0.22), including specific indirect associations through emotion-management skills (B = 0.11, 95% CI 0.07 to 0.15), problematic social media use (B = 0.04, 95% CI 0.02 to 0.06) and their serial pathway (B = 0.03, 95% CI 0.01 to 0.04).

CONCLUSIONS

Family harmony was associated with individual social responsibility directly and through emotion-related and digital-behavioural correlates. Because the data are cross-sectional, findings should be interpreted as associative rather than causal.