Abstract
This study investigated the effects of active private, passive private, and passive public social media use on adolescents’ affective well-being. Intensive longitudinal data (34,930 assessments in total) were collected through a preregistered three-week experience sampling method study among 387 adolescents. N = 1 time series were investigated, using Dynamic Structural Equation Modeling. Findings showed that different types of social media use very rarely yielded different effects within one and the same adolescent: 45% of adolescents experienced no changes in well-being due to any of the three types of social media use, 28% only experienced declines in well-being, and 26% only experienced increases in well-being. Only one adolescent experienced the theoretically expected effect pattern of a positive effect of active private and passive private use and negative effect of passive public use. Together, the findings suggest that the active–passive use dichotomy in social media research is less clear-cut than it might seem.
Highlights
This study investigated the effects of active private, passive private, and passive public social media use on adolescents’ affective well-being
Following the preregistered plan of analysis, we investigated the within-person effects of active private (H1), passive private (H2), and passive public (H3) social media use and between-person differences in these effects (H4) by means of Dynamic Structural Equation Modeling (DSEM) for intensive longitudinal data in Mplus Version 8.4 (Asparouhov et al, 2018)
The intraclass correlations (ICCs) indicated that half of the variance in well-being (46%), active private (50%), passive private (48%), and passive public (46%) social media use was explained by differences between adolescents
Summary
This study investigated the effects of active private, passive private, and passive public social media use on adolescents’ affective well-being. Most earlier studies have reported across-the-board effects of social media use on well-being among groups or subgroups of adolescents (for a review, see Verduyn et al, 2017) Both theory (Valkenburg & Peter, 2013) and empirical research (Beyens et al, 2020) suggest that the effects of social media use on well-being may differ from adolescent to adolescent. Investigating such person-specific social media effects on well-being is the second aim of this study
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