A closer look at appearance and social media: Measuring activity, self-presentation, and social comparison and their associations with emotional adjustment.

Abstract

Social media use links with 2 major concerns of adolescents, namely, appearance and comparing favorably with others. Founded on theory, our purpose was to develop a reliable and valid measure of appearance preoccupation online, the Social Media Appearance Preoccupation Scale (SMAPS). In Study 1 (N = 283 Grade 9–12 students), Australian adolescents completed surveys containing 21 SMAPS items. After psychometric analyses, 18 retained items loaded highly on factors tapping (a) online self-presentation, (b) appearance-related activity online, or (c) appearance comparison. The items loading on each factor had high interitem correlations, and girls had higher SMAPS scores than boys. In Study 2 (N = 327 Australian university students <26 years), the SMAPS was confirmed and validated with a range of measures of social media use, emotional adjustment, appearance concerns, and social behaviors. Factor loadings were invariant by gender, SMAPS subscale scores had very small correlations with age, and incremental validity was tested and supported. Additionally, SMAPS subscale scores interacted with general social media use, adding to the explanation of appearance anxiety. The SMAPS will be a useful resource for the study of appearance-related social media use and interactions with friends and others online. (APA PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved)