I am researching the effect of social media on social physique anxiety of young adults. What statistical test do I use when analysing data from the social physique anxiety scale? (Leary, 2013)
There are an array of tests that could be used such as ANOVA, Chi-Square, Generalized Liner Models, Factor analysis, regression and so forth.
Hello Lara,
The response scale (5 options, from Not at all characteristic of me to Extremely characteristic of me), and the multiple items (some of which need to be reverse scored), make it appear as if ordinary, parametric methods have been used for the majority of the times the scale is featured in titles of publications. Given that, the operative question becomes, what kind of research question(s) do you aim to address with your study? Given that, the choice of method would be more straightforward.
One notable exception was a study in which polytomous IRT (the graded response model) was applied. In such a case, one could certainly be far more confident that the resulting scale total behaved like an interval-strength scale.
Good luck with your work.
Lara,
It all depends on what your hypothesis is. If you're looking to see if something you measured varies as social physique anxiety changes, you would use a correlation. If you are looking to see if two groups differ in social physique anxiety, you would use a t-test.
If you don't have a hypothesis, and if you just want to describe how people answered, you could calculate the mean and the standard deviation of the social physique anxiety scores.
David Dunaetz David Morse
Hi,
Thank you for your replies. The aim of my study is to investigate whether social media has an affect on SPA, and to investigate whether social media has an affect on long-term adherence to physical activity. I am going to use the SPAS (Leary, 2013) to investigate my first aim, then the EMI-2 (Markland, 1997) to investigate my second aim. I am hypothesising that social media negatively effects both SPA and long-term adherence to PA.
It sounds like that you're using a model where frequency of social media use is your independent variable and both SPA and physical activity are your dependent variables. You can use a simple correlation (Pearson r) to test your hypotheses.
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