Ravanshenasi & Din

The purpose of this research is to compare the mental health and religious orientation of students who are users and non-users in social networks. The research method is "descriptive-comparative". The statistical population of this research included all the students of Tizhoshan high schools in Tabriz city in the academic year 2018-2019, among which 120 students scored 46-23 in the questionnaire "Addiction to mobile-based social networks" as non-users, and 120 students with scores higher than 46 in the said questionnaire were selected as user students after matching and using the "multi-stage and targeted cluster sampling" method. Data were collected by Goldberg and Hiller's (1979) "Mental Health" questionnaire and Hanif Khan et al.'s (2005) scale of "Muslim attitude towards religion". Data were analyzed using multivariate variance analysis in SPSS.23 software. The results of multivariate variance analysis showed that there is a significant difference between students who are users and non-users in social networks in terms of mental health and religious orientation. In addition, the results of Shafe's "follow-up" test also showed that social network users have significantly lower mental health and weaker religious orientation (p=0.005) than non-users of social networks. The findings of this research help to understand the basic differences between users and non-users of social networks in terms of mental health and religious orientation, and highlight the need to improve the mental health and religious orientation of students who use social networks.