Abstract
On a daily basis, individuals between 12 and 25 years of age engage with their mobile devices for many hours. Social Media Use (SMU) has important implications for the social life of younger individuals in particular. However, measuring SMU and its effects often poses challenges to researchers. In this exploratory study, we focus on some of these challenges, by addressing how plurality in the measurement and age-specific characteristics of SMU can influence its relationship with measures of subjective mental health (MH). We conducted a survey among a nationally representative sample of Dutch adolescents and young adults ( N = 3,669). Using these data, we show that measures of SMU show little similarity with each other, and that age-group differences underlie SMU. Similar to the small associations previously shown in social media-effects research, we also find some evidence that greater SMU associates to drops and to increases in MH. Albeit nuanced, associations between SMU and MH were found to be characterized by both linear and quadratic functions. These findings bear implications for the level of association between different measures of SMU and its theorized relationship with other dependent variables of interest in media-effects research.
Highlights
On a daily basis, individuals between 12 and 25 years of age engage with their mobile devices for many hours
We found significant increases in the number of platforms, time spent on screen, number of followers, and shared online/offline friends as a function of age, suggesting that individuals use more social media as they transit from adolescence to young adulthood
We identified age differences in mental health (MH) suggesting that adolescents score higher in overall MH compared to young adults
Summary
Individuals between 12 and 25 years of age engage with their mobile devices for many hours. Depending on the measures used to tackle engagement with social media (e.g., screen time, number of followers or platforms), on specific platform features (followers on Instagram, or retweets on Twitter), and on developmental characteristics during early and later adolescence, a very different picture about the relation of SMU and other variables of interest can arise (Bij de Vaate et al, 2020; Dienlin & Johannes, 2020; Twenge & Farley, 2021) This may lead to assumptions researchers often adopt in studying SMU and to misreporting actual effects (Foster & Jackson, 2019; Vannucci & Ohannessian, 2019)
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