A Conceptual Framework on Emotional Maturity towards Social Media Usage among Youth in Malaysia

Vol. 13, No. 5, 2023, Pg


Introduction
Today's generation of children and adolescents are surrounded by and immersed in a digital environment.Traditional media, such as television (TV), radio, and periodicals, have been supplemented by new digital technologies that promote interactive and social engagement and allow children and teenagers instant access to entertainment, information, and knowledge; social contact; and marketing.Technology and online media are frequently blamed for accelerated growth that does not come with maturity and personal development.As such, this study tends to see how this access to the Internet and social media has a stronghold in teens' maturity in Selangor both mentally and physically.Most parents agree that modern children grow up faster than any previous generation.By the age of 12, kids have their own Facebook account, and at the age of 15, they expect nearly full independence and trust from adults.The latter is confused and even frightened by the behaviour of the offspring: enhanced sexuality, perfectionism, substance abuse, and neglect of the family duties prevent a comprehensive development of a young personality.Besides that, youth's emotion and mental development is an essential component to ensure the children's emotion is normal.
A new study by Geddes (2014) has confirmed what most researchers hypothesized: kids are maturing much faster these days, and parents feel the Internet and social media are to blame.It seems like every generation and adult are critical of "kids these days" and how they are growing up too fast.They recall a simpler time when they were kids and lament the fact that their children are maturing and becoming adults more quickly than when they were young.Years ago, television got the blame for a lot of this, but now it's the Internet, and social media is seen to be the culprit, according to a new survey (Salminen et al., 2020;Warrender & Milne, 2020).Security firm Bullguard in 2013 surveyed over 2000 parents of kids aged 8 to 12, and most of those parents indicated that they were concerned that their kids were growing up too quickly.Seventy-seven per cent of them blamed the Internet for this and blamed peer pressure and the increased influence of celebrities in modern culture (Buckingham and Scanlon, 2014).Thus, this brings us to see why social media has so much hold on present-day teens.
Thus, this paper will overview and assess the relationship between social media usage and the emotional maturity of youth when using social media.The youth should grow with the incredible growth of mental, emotional as well as physical.The abnormal mental, emotional, and physical development will give side effects to their mental and physical development.This paper will highlight the emotional maturity of the youth when using social media.This topic is important to discuss because parents should know how social media could harmful the youth.The impact of social media usage on the mental and emotional of the youth should be measured by the suggested method to ensure the low score, which indicates the youth has emotional maturity rather than emotional immature.If the youth show emotional immature, the parents should control the social media usage of youth.This paper could contribute to preserving youth's mental and emotional health, especially producing an excellent leader in the future.

Literature Review An Overview of Social Media
Social media has been seen as a platform to share, promote and advertise information and content to other people.It also gives the experience of enjoyment for the youth to explore more in social media.The variety of features in social media could attract teenagers and youth to spend more time using it.According to Fox and Edwards (2021), the teen spends more time with media and technology rather than spend their time with parents, time in school and anything.Other studies show teenagers use social media more to relieve their boredom by chatting, and other engagements use it (Ocansey, 2016).Through this scenario, social media is consuming more time of the user, but it could also assist the user in communicating by chatting with them virtually or online.However, what is social media?Social media has been referred to as computer-based technology that could facilitate sharing of information, ideas, and thought by building virtual networks and communities (Dollarhide, 2021).At the same time, social media are also seen as any form of media that allows people to communicate (Aman & Hussin, 2018).According to Nation (2021), social media is a webbased communication tool that enables people to interact with others by sharing and using information.Social media show the positive side of it while students participate in the online learning system whereby lecturers use multiple platforms to convey their syllabus content to the students.The student should manage their time properly to make sure they can balance and manage their time by using it for enjoyment or academics.Without proper time management, social media surely will affect their academic performance and affect their future.

Emotional Maturity
There are several earlier definitions of emotional maturity.One of them, defined by Smitson (1974), states it is a process in which the personality continuously strives for the great sense of emotion, health, both inter physically and intra personally".In recent years, Lamothe (2020) defines emotional maturity show when someone can manage their emotion no matter their circumstance.Besides that, emotional maturity is an internal development of balancing the mind and intellect with reality (Dangwal & Srivastava, 2016).A high level of emotional maturity will make an individual more integrity.As a result, their attitudes and behaviour are emotionally mature.It is also one of the great determinant factors to make sure it will shape an individual's personality, behaviour, and attitudes and protect the relationship with other people.
The person's emotional maturity could shape their positive personality and interact with friends, family members, peers, society, and culture.Those individuals also could adjust their environment appropriately.Besides that, the ability of an individual with emotional maturity, they could handle the situation based on purposefully even in the worst environment.The emotional maturity of an individual has positive and negative components.Social media could boost buster; however, it also gives negative vibes because internet users could become addicted to social media.There are varieties of characters of emotional maturities, such as the ability to experience and deepest feelings of someone.The mature of their emotion, especially when using social media, could avoid the user's stress or ill behaviour.

Previous Study on Maturity and Media
Today's children and young people become consumers at an earlier age than previous generations, and they are also much heavier media users.The rapidly changing pace in our society regarding media technology, information processing, and economy and consumption patterns makes it possible for them to experience purchasing and consumption at a rate much faster than previous generations.The earlier study by Mead (1970) discussed the development of our society into a prefigurative culture, a culture in which adults learn from adults and their children.In families, children sometimes share their consumption experience with their parents, and parents learn different consumption roles from their children (Ekström 1995).This has been referred to as 'keeping up with the children' (Ekström, 2007) or children as frontrunners (Tufte et al., 2005).Relations to family members are continuously negotiated concerning consumption as part of everyday life.Future research needs to consider the plurality of family structures and recognize that there are many family types and different ways of being a family (Ekström, 2004).
By understanding family activities in relation to media, we can better understand the role media play in family life.Children's consumption preferences and patterns cannot be separated from their use of traditional and new media, and no matter where they live, young people turn to new media and communication culture with the same curiosity, enthusiasm and will to master the technology.The culture of children and young people is global when it comes to media.To a certain extent, many researchers have found the same patterns among young people worldwide on maturity and media Florence Undiyaundeye (2014); Kiran & Shipra (2016); Shilpa and Srimathi (2016); Senad (2018); Cipolletta et al (2020) to name few.However, it should also be mentioned that there are nuances based on geography and economics as well as differences depending on whether the child lives in a country rich in media and having a high level of media and communications technology -or the opposite.TV is still the most used media, but the Internet and mobile phones rapidly increase as communication tools among children and adolescents (Drotner, 2001;Livingstone & Bovill, 2001;Livingstone et al., 2005;Kiran et al., 2016;Cipolletta et al., 2020).

Issues and Challenges of Social Media and Emotion towards Youth in Malaysia
In Malaysia, many scholars show tremendous interest in the emotional maturity study with the effect of social media.It shows that young adults in Malaysia are fairly intensive social media users and have increased yearly.Many researchers have found that social media has influenced the young generation's emotions and impacted emotional maturity.Today, the youth has more disruptive behaviour (Perveen et al., 2018;Freeman, 2013), and some of them are caused by social media.These issues may be influenced by celebrities who have ill behaviour, which could influence them to do those behaviours.Even though there are celebrities who have good attitudes and behaviour, there are also some influences who have ill attitudes and behaviour, which could lead to disruptive on the emotional of the youth.The advice that comes from unprofessional people in social media could harm the viewer, which is youth.The usage of social media in this way could affect the emotional and mental of youth.Besides that, pornography and self-harm pictures could influence the mental and emotional of youth because the child could intend to harm themselves when they have problems with friends or family members.
There is some scenario which could influence the emotional maturity of youth while using the social media.According to Arendt et al (2019), Instagram receives more scholarly attention due to many publicly available portray self-harm graphics and pictures.As a result, this image will be a risk to the youth.According to Brown et al ( 2018), the harmful effect could lead towards a triggered effect to imitation behaviour.This is because youth are full will curiosity, so they will imitate any self-harmful image or picture to themselves or imitate it for bullying other people.Most young people spend more time online daily, and those who have selfharm may already access the Internet more frequently than those who do not know about self-harm (Dyson et al., 2016).These cases show the emotions and behaviour of youth is vulnerable.They could harm themselves in a variety of ways that imitate from the picture, image, text, video, and audio from social media.

Emotional Maturity Scale (EMS): A Measuring Tool
The emotional Maturity Scale by Singh and Bhargava (1990) has been selected as a tool to measure the emotional maturity among youth in assessing the relationship between social media usage and emotional maturity among teenagers.Through this EMS, the result could be seen based on the high and low scores of the result.According to Napa et al (2018), the high score shows emotional immaturity, while the low score indicates the emotional maturity of the youth.Several dimensions have been introduced by Singh and Bhargava (1990) that could be measuring tools in assessing the relationship between social media and emotional maturity.This tool could assess the measurement, such as emotional stability, emotional progression, social adjustment, personality integration, and independence.

Emotional stability
This dimension means the person's characteristics that do not allow him to react excessively or given to swings in moods or marked changes in Emotional stability in any emotive situation.

Emotional progression
The person's characteristic means the feeling of adequate advancement and growing vitality of emotions in relation to the environment to ensure positive thinking imbued with righteousness and contentment.

Social adjustment
It refers to the interaction between the needs of person and demands of the social environment, which promotes the desired relationship.

Personality Integration
The process of firmly unifying the diverse elements of an individual's motives and dynamic tendencies is called personality integration.

Independence
Independence is the capacity of a person's attitudinal tendency to be self-reliant or of resistance to control by others, where he can take his decisions by his own judgment based on facts by utilizing his intellectual and creative potentialities.
The previous study shows the girl has a higher emotional maturity for emotional stability, social adjustment, personality integration and independence and overall emotional maturity (Napa et al., 2018).However, there is emotionally immature youth towards social media usage.Immature emotional behaviour may refer to the abnormal emotional development of youth.Heavy use of the Internet has been associated with the potential of side effects such as less control over internet usage, lack of communication with a family member, and emotional status (Sowndarya & Pattar, 2018) make the result for Emotional Maturity Status is high.This study will extend by exploring the relationship of emotion maturity towards youth social media, particularly in Malaysia.The different environments would lead to different results on this topic.

Social Media Usage
Technology use is essential component that explain and assess on the usage, acceptance, impact and success on information system.In assessing the social media usage, the traditional theory called Uses and Gratification (U&G) theory can be used to understand the social and psychological needs towards the technology or social media usage among society.According to Katz et al (1974), U&G theory concerned on the social and psychological needs which generate expectations of the media and lead to differential patterns of media exposure (or engagement in other activities), resulting in needs gratification.This theory will assess individual specific wants and needs in using the media.Unlike other theories in media usage, this theory sees users as active agents who have the control on their media usage.This theory also seen the users aware the reasons for selecting the media options.
The Uses and Gratification (U&G) theory have three major type of needs that can be gratified by different media of social needs, hedonic needs, and cognitive needs.Social needs refer to the need that strengthen contact with the family, friends, and acquaintances; hedonic needs refer to affective needs of pleasurable and emotional experience meanwhile cognitive needs is seeking for the information, knowledge and understanding (Katz et al., 1973;McQuaill, 1994).However, Ali-Hassan et al ( 2015) has conceptualized three dimensions of social media based on the component in the Uses and Gratification (U&G) theory consist of social needs, hedonic needs, and cognitive needs.Social needs that has been conceptualized Ali-Hassan, Nevo and Wade (2015) state social needs refer to using the social media to builds the new relation by making the new friends, share the same interest with others individual and stay contact with the existing friends.While Ali-Hassan et al ( 2015) also state the hedonic needs defined as using the social media for fun, passing time, relaxing and escaping and entertainments.Cognitive needs refer to using the social media by focuses on creating and sharing content as well as access the content by the individual including sharing opinions, raring, debate and other online activities.In this study, the researcher will used the dimension that has been conceptualized by Ali-Hassan et al (2015) for the social media usage among youth in Malaysia.
Those activities is frequently executed by the youth when using the social media.This is because the social media has provided the opportunities for connecting with others people (family and friends), creating and be part of the community that would be foster creativity, knowledge and civic participation (Martin et al., 2018).The youth could become content creating that required the creativity and innovation tin creating the eye catching and significant content to their viewer.Through the research that has been conducted by Vaingankar et al (2022), the findings reveal that the wide activities on social media connecting with family and friends to participating the global movements and this could build the positive mental health among youth.Therefore, the mention component in Uses and Gratification (U&G) theory as well as dimension that has been conceptualized by Ali-Hassan et al (2015) will be used in exploring the emotional maturity of youth towards social media uses in Malaysia.

Proposed Conceptual Framework on Emotional Maturity towards Social Media Usage among Youth
In assessing the theory and model related with the emotional maturity towards social media usage, the researcher has come out and will propose the conceptual framework regarding the topic of this study.The purpose of this framework to measure the emotional maturity of the youth towards the social media usage particularly in Malaysia.This is significantly to understand the impact of the emotional maturity of the youth when using the social media.
The conceptual framework that will be proposed come from the Emotional Maturity Scale by Singh and Bhargava (1990) and dimension of social media usage that has been conceptualized by (Ali-Hassan et al., 2015).In this proposed conceptual framework, there are five dimensions on independent variable consist of emotional stability, emotional progression, social adjustment, personality integration and independence.Meanwhile, the depending on variable is social media usage among youth and its dimension is social needs, hedonic needs and cognitive needs.The proposed conceptualized framework as below:

Research Methodology
For this paper, the literature survey has been selected as a method to explore and investigate the relationship between social media usage and emotional maturity among youth in Malaysia.A literature survey is defined as documentation of a comprehensive review of published and unpublished work by other researchers based on their research interests (Sekaran, 2003).The researcher and author assessed a variety of published and unpublished work by previous scholars and identified the trends and progression of this topic towards developing the body of knowledge.Literature survey is the right method because before surveying the sample, the researcher wants to understand and identify the trends and research implemented by other countries.
During the literature survey exploration, the researcher has assessed various secondary data sources to discover the topic of study.Secondary data sources are the data that has already been collected through primary sources and made available for the researcher to use for their own research (Formplus, 2021).There are various secondary data sources such as journals, government documentation, articles, newspapers, and magazines.In this paper, the researcher has explored and dig out the information from journal and websites to understand this matter clearly.More information and new research have been discovered to discover and identify social media and emotional maturity among adolescents rather than teenagers.This paper may suggest and contribute to the body of knowledge on the related subject.

Conclusion
In conclusion, the study's suggested variable can be used as a guideline for assessing the relationship between media and maturity among teens.The framework contains all the necessary and critical constructs for measuring the factor influencing teenagers' maturity.
There are five main components to measure the factor that influencing the teenagers maturity towards social media usage consist of emotional stability, emotional progression, social adjustment, personality integration and independence.This framework will surely look up the maturity of teenager towards social media usage in Malaysia.This framework or model is significantly contributed in identified the level of maturity of Malaysia teenagers in adapting and adopting when using the social media every day.Ferrera and Yang (2015) mention that social media content produced and consume can affect the emotional state and behavior of individual.This is because there are individual who fail to control their emotion.Therefore, that is important to understand the emotional state of teenager for better control and overcome any negative impact of social media to them.
In perspective of theoretical, Malaysia does not have any empirical-based framework to determine the relationship between social media use and emotional maturity among adolescents.Therefore, this study gives the scholar an empirical-based framework of the relationship between media and maturity among teens, which is related to social media usage among youth.The framework should be of interest to the researchers focusing on this topic.
In addition, other researchers may also be interested in validating the framework in a different context.The findings may significantly alter teenagers' perception of social media to understand better understand the do's and don't and advantages and disadvantages.This theoretical contribution could significantly contribute towards the body of knowledge especially within the social science fields particularly regarding the technological behavior of youth.The new data and findings will be discovered and the researcher could recommends variety solution to solve the issues of social media addiction among youth.
Meanwhile, in term of contextual perspective, this research beneficial to studies because it is useful in identifying the trends and topic within the contexts.This is because now is the current trends of using the social media among teenager or youth arise since the digital technology appear in current 21 st century.Besides that, researcher also could understand how the emotional of youth will be influenced by its contextual situation that could be related with social media usage.Nowadays, the usage of social media among youth arise, therefore the emotional maturity need to assess to make sure teenagers could receive positively any information in those social media.Moreover, social media not only platform that provide interaction between human but it also platform that could be used to share content, news, or new ideas discussed within the intellectual community.This mechanism will indirectly become the ways to disseminate the information to the public.The above mentioned statement show the significantly and important of this framework or model for teenager's well-being towards social media usage.

Figure 1 :
Figure 1: Proposed Conceptual Framework on Emotional Maturity towards Social Media Usage among youth.

Table 1
Dimension of Emotional Maturity Scale (EMS)