Exploring Social Media Use Integration Based on Educational Level Among Emerging Adults

Objective: Social media has become integral to everyday life, including among emerging adults. Surveys showed that Instagram has become one of emerging adults' most popular social media. Social media could facilitate emerging adult developmental tasks, such as identity exploration. Further, social media uses integration concepts to explore how individuals build emotional connections and involve social media in their daily social routines. Additionally, it is essential to view social media use integration based on educational background. This study explored differences in social media use integration among emerging adults based on education level. Method: A cross-sectional study design was conducted among 305 men and women emerging adults. Participants completed a self-administered questionnaire comprising demographic characteristics and a Social Media Use Integration scale. Data were analyzed using descriptive analysis and one-way ANOVA statistic technique. Results: Descriptive analysis results showed that individuals with a high school education level had the highest social media use integration scores compared to groups from other education levels. Further, education level notably contributed to the score difference in social media use integration among emerging adults. Novelty: This study contributed to exploring further the social media use integration among emerging adults, specifically in the context of educational background.


INTRODUCTION
Social media has significantly allowed humans to create more effective and efficient communication.Through social media, individuals may have easier access to maintain interpersonal relationships with their closest relatives (Khan et al., 2022).Social media has also become an integral part of everyday life.Statista reported that in early January 2023, over 4.76 billion (59.40%) of the world's population accessed the internet using social media.Specifically in Indonesia, social media users continue to increase and are predicted to reach more than 267 million users by 2028 (Degenhard, 2023).This increased number of social media users coincides with the increased types of social media platforms offered, with Instagram being one of the most popular.
In early 2023, there were more than 2 billion active Instagram users worldwide, with Indonesia ranked 4 th as the country with the most Instagram users.Further, it was recorded that 33.80% of Indonesia's population actively uses Instagram, with more than half (52.20%) being female.Moreover, most Instagram users in Indonesia were emerging adults, with a percentage of 38.00%.Emerging adults are individuals between the ages of 18 and 29 years, and this stage of development is known as an exploratory phase, which allows individuals to explore their interests and desires in life (Ardelia & Dewi, 2018).This exploration, therefore, must be connected to the active use of social media, where emerging adults were the group with the highest number of users who used the internet, owned smart devices, and actively used social media.Moreover, social media has become an essential aspect of the lives of emerging adults as a way of forming their identities and building social relationships (Bjornsen, 2018).
The proximity of social media to everyday life brought both positive and negative impacts on its users.The existence of social media provided a more diverse source of entertainment, a means of information, and a means of establishing communication and relationships with others (Ostic et al., 2021).Social media also encouraged collective behavior through group communication that helped build individual self-identity (Dhir et al., 2018).Aside from its benefits, social media such as Instagram also brought negative impacts, namely addiction, loneliness, depression, social isolation, and social anxiety (Chotpitayasunondh & Douglas, 2016;Dhir et al., 2018;Reer et al., 2019;Swar & Hameed, 2017;van den Eijnden et al., 2016).Further, studies showed that higher intensity in media social usage could lead to a higher propensity for individuals to make social comparisons, which then causes decreased self-esteem.In turn, high social comparison and low selfesteem can lead to social anxiety in an individual (Jiang & Ngien, 2020).Similarly, Instagram usage is also associated with a tendency to dissatisfaction with body image and eating disorders (Faelens et al., 2021), which usually results from upward social comparison to social media influencers (Pedalino & Camerini, 2022).
Numerous studies have examined the use of social media, especially Instagram, and its association with individual psychological concepts such as psychological well-being (Ostic et al., 2021;Trifiro, 2018), self-esteem (Paramboukis et al., 2016;Widjajanta et al., 2018), social comparison (Stapleton et al., 2017), social anxiety (Jiang & Ngien, 2020) and the influence of social media use on mental health in general (Karim et al., 2020).However, these studies only measured the frequency and duration of Instagram use but did not involve aspects of emotional connection and Instagram involvement in individuals' social routines.Therefore, Social Media Use Integration refers to individuals' ability to incorporate social media into their typical routines and how people are emotionally attached to the social media platform(s).Further, they also developed a scale to measure these concepts.Social media use integration concepts could provide a more rigorous measure of how people integrate and utilize social media into their daily lives.Currently, most of the studies related to the context of social media use integration came from Western countries which are developed countries.Thus, research in developing countries, especially in Indonesia, remained scarce.
The integrative use of social media among emerging adults is also inseparable from the context of education, in which emerging adults usually still undergo a certain level of education.Especially nowadays, technology, including social media, is implemented in the learning processes in the classroom (Al-Rahmi et al., 2022a) and is perceived to have both positive and negative impacts, depending on the type of social media used (Xu et al., 2023).Various studies have explored the use of social media in educational contexts and found that the use of social media can improve the quality of learning in students (Al-Rahmi et al., 2022b;Ansari & Khan, 2020;Chawinga, 2017;Van Den Beemt et al., 2020).Utilizing social media in collaborative learning allows students to become more creative, dynamic, and research-oriented (Ansari & Khan, 2020), and obtain better exam scores (Javaeed et al., 2020).Especially with the COVID-19 pandemic, social media has become highly used to support learning (Alismaiel et al., 2022;Sengupta & Vaish, 2023).
However, to the best of the researcher's knowledge, only a few studies have focused on exploring individuals' ability to use social media integratively based on their level of education.Previous studies have focused on student achievement in the learning process, which utilized social media.Nevertheless, the students' social media use integration has yet to be the research focus.Since each level of education has different dynamics and demands, it impacts each individual differently.The capacity level of social media use integration based on the education level is the research focus, which is expected to be the basis for further research focusing on students' capacity and the utilization of social media in the learning process.
To conclude, this research aimed to explore differences in the social media use integration among emerging adults based on education level.The social media platform used in this study was Instagram, as several previous studies found that image-based social media, such as Instagram, was most favored and used by emerging adults (Bjornsen, 2018).The social media use integration itself refers to the emotional connections formed by using Instagram social media and the involvement of using social media as part of an individual's social routine.Several research questions of this study included: 1.What is the level of integrative social media use among emerging adults?2. Is there a significant difference in the SMUIS scores of emerging adults based on education level?

RESEARCH METHOD General background of research
The current study used a quantitative research design with a cross-sectional survey data collection method.Online data collection was conducted through Google form with the Social Media Use Integration scale.Participants were asked to read the description and instructions of the questionnaire and then provided consent to participate in the study before completing the survey.Ethical approval was obtained from The Board of Ethics, Faculty of Psychology, Universitas Airlangga, before the study (Number 2806-KEPK).

Participants
The research participants were selected by an accidental sampling method, in which participants who fit the inclusion criteria could voluntarily choose to become participants or not.Participants' inclusion criteria were 1) aged between 18-29 years old, 2) owning and using Instagram, and 3) residing in Indonesia.Before data collection, researchers calculated the sample size needed in this study using G*Power.Based on the G*Power calculation formula, it is estimated that at least 82 participants are required to obtain a power of 0.8 and a moderate effect size.However, the researcher targeted a minimum of 100 participants due to the generality of the research criteria.

Instrument and Procedures
Two instruments were used in this study, namely the socio-demographic scale and the Social Media Use Integration scale.The socio-demographic scale contains questions about participants' personal data information such as name (initials allowed), age (with options from 18 to 29 years), gender, regional origin (city/district), and education level (junior high school, high school, undergraduate, graduate, doctoral).The Social Media Use Integration Scale (SMUIS) measures the integration between social media use and individual social behaviors and routines.This scale consists of two dimensions with a total of 10 items.The social integration and emotional connection dimension had six items (e.g., "I would like it if everyone used Instagram to communicate"), and the integration to social routines (ISR) dimension consisted of four items (e.g., "Using Instagram is part of my everyday routine").A Likert rating scale with a score range of 1 "Strongly disagree" to 5 "Strongly agree" was used.One item required reverse scoring before calculating the total score.High-scoring participants indicated high intensity and integration of social media use and social routines.

Data Analysis
Data analysis was carried out with the Jamovi program for macOS version 2.3.21.Data was analyzed using descriptive statistics analysis and the One-Way ANOVA technique to answer the research questions.These analyses were conducted to obtain information regarding participants' demographic characteristics and whether any differences in SMUIS results occurred based on education level.

Demographic Characteristics
Table 1 shows the demographic characteristics of the study participants.There were 305 participants involved in this study, of which 80.33% were female (n = 245), and the rest were male (n = 60).The age of participants varied from 18 to 29 years old, with a mean age of 21 years old.Regarding educational background, the majority of participants (68.85%) had a high school education, 26.56% had a bachelor's degree, 4.26% had a master's degree, and the rest had a doctoral degree (0.33%).

Descriptives Analysis
Descriptive analysis of SMUIS in participants was carried out in several ways, the first is based on gender, then based on the level of education as described in Table 2. Subsequently, a differential analysis test of SMUIS level based on education level was also conducted.Based on gender, it is known that women tend to have a higher ability to use social media integratively (M = 30.30)than men (M = 29.60).Furthermore, from the level of education, it was found that participants with a high school educational background had the highest ability to use social media integratively (M = 30.Table 3 showed differences in SMUIS results based on education level among participants.Findings showed significant differences in SMUIS based on education level (F(3, 301) = 145, p = 0.024,  2 = 0.021).These findings suggest that educational level contributed to the integration of social media use among emerging adults.

Discussion
This study aimed to obtain a descriptive analysis of social media use integration among emerging adults and explore differences in the ability to use social media integratively based on education level.Descriptive analysis showed that high school education groups had the highest social media use integration results compared to other education levels.
Based on the ANOVA test results, education level notably contributed to the score difference in social media use integration among emerging adults.This suggests that the ability to form emotional connections to social media and the involvement of using social media as part of an individual's social routine is associated with the individual's educational background (Anastasiei et al., 2023;Bekalu et al., 2019).Descriptive analysis showed that individuals with a high school education level had the highest SMUI scores compared to groups from other education levels.These findings suggested that individuals with a high school level of education are more able to use social media more integratively in their daily routines.Individuals with high school backgrounds were entering the early emerging adult period, and at this stage of development, social connections were considered an important aspect.Furthermore, it has been known that people in high school education are currently on identity exploration, and social media is deemed a suitable medium to facilitate this exploration (Dennen et al., 2020;Gandolfi et al., 2021;Zhang et al., 2022).The explorations include seeking validation for their thoughts and experiences, which emerging adults perceived social media platforms could provide.Additionally, according to social identity gratification, early emerging adults use social media in an integrated manner, as they see it as a tool to satisfy social identity needs.Social media have been known both as a tool and a place to enhance positive self-image.
In education, using social media in the era of technological development was inevitable.Especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, which required learning to be conducted online, integrating social media into education became the primary choice.Consequently, participants with high school education have become accustomed to implementing social media in educational contexts.Learning that uses technology, including social media, enhances students' learning experience and facilitates the sharing of information and knowledge from teachers to students (Al-Rahmi et al., 2022).On top of that, teachers were starting to utilize social media as part of the learning processes such as providing announcements, assignment submission, class schedule negotiation, and class discussion (Kara et al., 2020).This may also be the case for individuals with undergraduate education backgrounds who are currently undergoing postgraduate education, albeit at a lower intensity than participants at the high school level who are currently undergoing undergraduate studies.
Social media has also become an essential medium for collaborative learning in the digital era (Ansari & Khan, 2020;Liu et al., 2022).A study conducted by Ansari & Khan (2020) found that the use of social media in collaborative learning impacts the interaction between teachers and students as well as between students and affects students' attachment to learning, which could improve academic performance.Additionally, the use of social media in collaborative learning facilitates students to be more creative.Similarly, a study conducted by Liu et al. (2022) also found that collaboration on social media could provide learning media that improves study performance.These benefits have made the use of social media in education more massive.
The personal need to use social media as a place to build relationships, combined with the encouragement to use social media as a means of collaborative learning in the realm of education, makes the ability to use social media integratively in those at the high school education level higher than groups from other education levels.Moreover, participants with high school education levels were digital natives who were born and grew up in the midst of social media development.Thus, it is uncommon for them to be familiar with using social media daily.It is also understandable that emerging adults are socially and emotionally attached to social media and also have a higher ability to integrate social media into their daily routines.Furthermore, it is essential to note that social media use can positively and negatively affect students (Chen & Xiao, 2022).Individuals who are more equipped to use social media in an integrated way might be better at coping with the negative impacts of social media.However, teachers' role in the learning process is still crucial, as they are the ones who can regulate the extent to which social media will be utilized to avoid negative impacts.The role of educators in the learning process that utilizes social media can be the subsequent research.

CONCLUSION Fundamental Finding:
A marked score difference in social media use integration based on educational level was found.Participants with a high school education background could integrate social media use into their daily routines more than other education levels.Implication: This study's results imply that the increased use of social media in educational contexts should be integrated into the learning processes to create a collaborative learning experience.Limitation: This study had strengths and limitations.
The study's strengths were the fair number of participants and the detailed distribution of educational levels ranging from high school to doctoral level.The weakness referred to the unbalanced distribution of participants from each educational level and the usage of self-report measurement, which could lead to potential bias in the subjects' responses.This study also did not involve additional potential variables that could affect the association between social media use integration and educational level.Future Research: Future research should comparatively examine students' achievement and psychological impact based on the level of social media use integration.It also explores the influence of social media integration on psychological aspects in other contexts, such as the workplace and cultural contexts.

Table 3 .
Differences in SMUIS based on education level.