Impact of Social Media on the Vanity Level of Youngsters in India

RUCHI TEWARI¹ & SANTANA PATHAK²
¹Amrut Mody School of Management, Ahmedabad
²Centre for Heritage Management, Ahmedabad

Abstract
This paper is an attempt to measure the impact of social media on the vanity level of youngsters in India. An experimental research was conducted on a controlled group of 40 participants with an average age of 23 years. Netemeyer’s vanity scale was administered on the participants and their vanity was measured. A month later, the participants in the research were put under controlled conditions for two hours and exposed to social media. They were instructed to log into their social media accounts and instructed to engage into activities like updating their status, uploading new photographs, reading comments and going through the number of likes which had been made on their earlier loaded statuses and photographs. Post two hours, their vanity level was measured. Data was analysed using paired sample t-tests as well as confirmatory factor analysis and comparison was made along the factors of Netemeyer ’s Vanity Scale pre and post the exposure to social media activity.

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Dr. Ruchi Tewari teaches in the area of applied communication at Amrut Mody School of Management, Ahmedabad, India. She is specialized in business communication and its impact on society and culture.
Santana Pathak is a research scholar working in the area of communication management at Centre for Heritage Management, Ahmedabad University, Ahmedabad, India.