Bergen Social Media Addiction Scale

BSMAS

psychologyhealth sciencessocial sciencesFree for research use

Permission: Free for research use. Free for non-commercial academic research, with no license fee. Cite the original publication.

A 6-item scale applying the components model of addiction (salience, mood modification, tolerance, withdrawal, conflict, relapse) to social-media use over the past year.

Items

Response format

5-point frequency scale (1-5)

Version

1.0

Ready-to-cite methods sentence

Problematic social-media use was measured with the Bergen Social Media Addiction Scale (BSMAS; Andreassen et al., 2016), a 6-item scale with good internal consistency (α ≈ .88).

Citing this in a methods section? This scale spans more than one discipline, so the style depends on where you publish. See the APA 7 or Vancouver guides, or compare all six citation styles.

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Reliability & validation

Validation population

Norwegian cross-sectional sample (Andreassen et al., 2016)

Cronbach's α

0.88

Response anchors

Very rarely · Rarely · Sometimes · Often · Very often

Known limitations

The 'addiction' framing is debated; the scale identifies at-risk use, not a formal disorder, and thresholds are not standardized across cultures.

Original citation

Andreassen, C. S., Billieux, J., Griffiths, M. D., Kuss, D. J., Demetrovics, Z., Mazzoni, E., & Pallesen, S. (2016). The relationship between addictive use of social media and video games and symptoms of psychiatric disorders: A large-scale cross-sectional study. Psychology of Addictive Behaviors, 30(2), 252-262.

https://doi.org/10.1037/adb0000160

Questions researchers ask

What does the BSMAS measure?

A 6-item scale applying the components model of addiction (salience, mood modification, tolerance, withdrawal, conflict, relapse) to social-media use over the past year.

How many items does the BSMAS have?

The Bergen Social Media Addiction Scale (BSMAS) has 6 items.

Is the BSMAS free to use?

The BSMAS is free to use for non-commercial academic research. You don't need to pay a license fee, but you should always cite the original publication.

Is the BSMAS reliable?

Validation studies report Cronbach's α of 0.88. See the reliability section for the population studied and full statistics.

Who developed the BSMAS, and how do I cite it?

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Library entry verified July 2026. Metadata is provided for reference. Questionnaires are built in Folio Surveyor, subject to each instrument's licensing, and can be taken to Qualtrics, Google Forms or Microsoft Forms, with their CSV responses brought back for scoring.