Perceived Time Spent on TikTok, Overall User Satisfaction, and Parallel Psychological Costs

With the rapid growth of short-video platforms, it has become increasingly important to understand the psychological processes that sustain prolonged engagement and contribute to individual evaluative responses. This study examines the dual pattern of associations involving perceived time spent on TikTok by investigating whether it is positively associated with overall user satisfaction while also being linked to psychological cost-related responses, including privacy concerns, health consciousness, social interaction anxiety, and social media fatigue. Data were collected through an online survey administered via Prolific and analyzed using structural equation modeling (SEM) and fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA). The findings show that perceived time spent on TikTok is significantly associated with health consciousness and social interaction anxiety. Perceived time spent on TikTok is also directly and positively associated with overall user satisfaction. Moreover, privacy concerns and social media fatigue are negatively associated with overall user satisfaction. The fsQCA results further reveal six configurations associated with high user satisfaction. These configurations illustrate the principle of equifinality and indicate that no single condition reached the conventional threshold for necessity. Overall, the findings suggest that high user satisfaction can coexist with different combinations of psychological cost-related responses, thereby offering a more nuanced account of how users experience short-video platforms.