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Filipinos have been using social media platforms to connect, interact, and get news about celebrities. Previous studies have shown that persons who are strongly attracted to a favorite celebrity were more likely to be addicted to social media. The present study was an attempt to replicate those findings with a total of 508 Filipino adolescents, ages 18 to 24, who are social media users. They completed the Celebrity Attitude Scale (CAS) and the Social Media Addiction Scale. Results showed that a highly significant relationship exists between celebrity worship and social media addiction. Further analysis showed that it was the Entertainment-Social subscale of the CAS that significantly predicted the risk of social media addiction among the participants. Additionally, we found that one's favorite celebrity category chosen by our participants was somewhat similar to results from previous studies.
Keywords: celebrity worship, parasocial relationship, social media addiction, Filipinos
Although it is normal during adult development for children and adolescents to admire and form fan attachments to celebrities as part of identity formation (Stever, 2010; Yue & Cheung, 2000), one concern is the extreme identification with the values of celebrities (Maltby et al., 2004) and the formation of unhealthy parasocial relationships (Brown & Tiggeman, 2016). Simply put, it is when a person develops a one-way admiration that sometimes morphs into an obsession with a favorite celebrity (Maltby et al., 2003).
To further explain celebrity worship, this study adopts the Celebrity Attitude Scale (CAS) and makes use of the "Absorption-Addiction" model proposed by McCutcheon et al. (2002). The CAS scale has three levels. The first level is called Entertainment-social, wherein people are interested in a celebrity mainly due to the celebrity's ability to entertain and provide a basis for social interaction with like-minded others (Maltby et al., 2004; Stever, 1991). Persons who score "high" on Entertainmentsocial tend to agree with statements such as "My friends and I like to discuss what my favorite celebrity has done." Some persons move on to the second level of emotional attachment with celebrities, termed Intense-personal. It has items such as "I consider my favorite celebrity to be my soulmate." This level of Intense-personal feeling reflects an individual's intense and compulsive feelings about the celebrity. The last stage and the most severe one is...