The effect of social media on well-being differs from adolescent to adolescent
Publication details
| Year: | 2020 |
| DOI: | 10.1038/s41598-020-67727-7 |
| Issued: | 2020 |
| Language: | English |
| Volume: | 10 |
| Issue: | 1 |
| Editors: | |
| Authors: | Beyens I.; Pouwels J.; van Driel I.; Keijsers L.; Valkenburg P. |
| Type: | Journal article |
| Journal: | Scientific Reports |
| Publisher: | Springer Science and Business Media LLC |
| Topics: | Wellbeing |
| Sample: | "Participants were recruited via a secondary school in the south of the Netherlands. Our preregistered sampling plan set a target sample size of 100 adolescents. We invited adolescents from six classrooms to participate in the study. Te fnal sample consisted of 63 adolescents (i.e., 42% consent rate, which is comparable to other ESM studies among adolescents; see, for instance35, 36). Informed consent was obtained from all participants and their parents. On average, participants were 15 years old (M=15.12 years, SD=0.51) and 54% were girls. All participants self-identifed as Dutch, and 41.3% were enrolled in the prevocational secondary education track, 25.4% in the intermediate general secondary education track, and 33.3% in the academic preparatory education track." (Beyens et al., 2020) |
Abstract
The question whether social media use benefits or undermines adolescents’ well-being is an important societal concern. Previous empirical studies have mostly established across-the-board effects among (sub)populations of adolescents. As a result, it is still an open question whether the effects are unique for each individual adolescent. We sampled adolescents’ experiences six times per day for one week to quantify differences in their susceptibility to the effects of social media on their momentary affective well-being. Rigorous analyses of 2,155 real-time assessments showed that the association between social media use and affective well-being differs strongly across adolescents: While 44% did not feel better or worse after passive social media use, 46% felt better, and 10% felt worse. Our results imply that person-specific effects can no longer be ignored in research, as well as in prevention and intervention programs
Outcome
"We found that the associations of passive (but not active) social media use with well-being difered substantially from adolescent to adolescent, with efect sizes ranging from moderately negative (− 0.24) to strongly positive (0.68). While 44.26% of adolescents did not feel better or worse if they had passively used social media, 45.90% felt better, and a small group felt worse (9.84%). In addition, for Instagram the majority of adolescents (73.91%) did not feel better or worse when they had spent more time viewing post or stories of others, whereas some felt better (17.39%), and others (8.70%) felt worse." (Beyens et al., 2020)