Examination of the serial mediating role of academic motivation and academic procrastination in the relationship between problematic social media use and school burnout of Turkish adolescents

Objective: The objective of this study is to examine the direct role of adolescents’ problematic social media use (PSMU) in school burnout (SB), as well as its indirect role in school burnout through academic motivation (AM) and academic procrastination (AP). Method: To achieve this objective, scales measuring problematic social media use, academic motivation, academic procrastination, and school burnout were administered to 558 high school students in Türkiye. In the data analysis, the reliability coefficients of the scales, kurtosis and skewness coefficients related to normality assumptions, and Pearson Correlation coefficients were calculated. Furthermore, PROCESS Macro was used for serial mediation analysis. Results: It was revealed that AM does not mediate the relationship between PSMU and SB, in contrast to AP, which exhibited a mediating role in simple mediation analysis. It was evident that the direct impact of PSMU on adolescents’ SB is significant, accompanied by a substantial indirect effect through AM and AP in the serial analysis, respectively. Conclusion: PSMU has been found to play a significant role in SB directly and indirectly via AM and AP.