Identity statuses and involvement of Polish secondary school youth in social media use

Abstract

The formation of a person's identity is a continuous and dynamic process, occurring at every stage of our lives, although the most important and crucial period is adolescence, especially its second phase falling between the ages of 16/17-20. In the light of contemporary research, we know that identity is not a fixed construct, but is subject to dynamic transformations not only during adolescence, but also at subsequent stages of adulthood (Brzezińska & Piotrowski, 2017). Identity formation is subject to various influences, one of which is the use of social media. Therefore an extremely important research task should be the searching for links between young people's identity statuses and their activity on social networks. We know that today's young people use social networks to explore themselves, but also to express themselves. The researchers who undertook this issue were Mannerström et al. (2018). Their studies concerned the dependencies between social media use and identity statuses. There is still not enough empirical research focusing on exploring the relationship between adolescents' engagement in digital activity and their identity formation process. This article presents the results of research into understanding this relationship. In this study was applied a diagnostic survey method. The research consisted of anonymous paper-and-pencil surveys. The study was designed to answer the question of how the identity statuses of the studied adolescents are linked to their excessive use of social media portals. The results confirmed that adolescents who have ruminative exploration identity statuses use social media portals statistically significantly more excessively (harmfully) than students presenting other identity statuses.