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. 2018;16(3):722-736.
doi: 10.1007/s11469-017-9844-x. Epub 2017 Nov 29.

An Exploratory Study of "Selfitis" and the Development of the Selfitis Behavior Scale

Janarthanan Balakrishnan  1 , Mark D Griffiths  2
Affiliations

An Exploratory Study of "Selfitis" and the Development of the Selfitis Behavior Scale

Janarthanan Balakrishnan et al. Int J Ment Health Addict. 2018.

Abstract

In 2014, stories appeared in national and international media claiming that the condition of "selfitis" (the obsessive taking of selfies) was to be classed as a mental disorder by the American Psychiatric Association and that the condition could be borderline, acute, or chronic. However, the stories were a hoax but this did not stop empirical research being carried out into the concept. The present study empirically explored the concept and collected data on the existence of selfitis with respect to the three alleged levels (borderline, acute, and chronic) and developed the Selfitis Behavior Scale (SBS). Initially, focus group interviews with 225 Indian university students were carried out to generate potential items for the SBS. The SBS was then validated using 400 Indian university students via exploratory factor analysis (EFA). Six factors were identified in the EFA comprising environmental enhancement, social competition, attention seeking, mood modification, self-confidence, and social conformity. The findings demonstrate that the SBS appears to be a reliable and valid instrument for assessing selfitis but that confirmatory studies are needed to validate the concept more rigorously.

Keywords: Selfie-taking; Selfies; Selfitis; Selfitis Behavior Scale; Social media.

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Conflict of interest statement

Compliance with Ethical StandardsThe authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.All procedures performed in this study involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the university’s research ethics board and with the 1975 Helsinki declaration.Informed consent was obtained from all participants.This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

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