The effect of social media on well-being differs from adolescent to adolescent

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

Integrating Communication Science and Computational Methods to Study Content-Based Social Media Effects

A pressing societal and scientific question is how social media use affects our cognitions, emotions, and behaviors. To answer this question, fine-grained insight into the content of individuals’ social media use is needed. It is difficult to study content-based social media effects with traditional survey methods because such methods are incapable of capturing the extreme volume and variety of social media content that is shared and received. Therefore, this special issue aims to illustrate how content-based social media effects could be examined by integrating communication sciences and computational methods. We describe a three-step method to investigate content-based media effects, which involves (a) collecting digital trace data, (b) performing automated textual and visual content analysis, and (c) conducting linkage analysis. This Special Issue zooms in on these steps and describes the strengths and weaknesses of different computational methods. We conclude with some challenges that need to be addressed in future research

Promises and Pitfalls of Social Media Data Donations

Studies assessing the effects of social media use are largely based on measures of time spent on social media. In recent years, scholars increasingly ask for more insights in social media activities and content people engage with. Data Download Packages (DDPs), the archives of social media platforms that each European user has the right to download, provide a new and promising method to collect timestamped and content-based information about social media use. In this paper, we first detail the experiences and insights of a data collection of 110 Instagram DDPs gathered from 102 adolescents. We successively discuss the challenges and opportunities of collecting and analyzing DDPs to help future researchers in their consideration of whether and how to use DDPs. DDPs provide tremendous opportunities to get insight in the frequency, range, and content of social media activities, from browsing to searching and posting. Yet, collecting, processing, and analyzing DDPs is also complex and laborious, and demands numerous procedural and analytical choices and decisions