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Griffith Research Onlinehttps://research-repository.griffith.edu.au Technology can sting when reality bites:Adolescents' frequent online coping is ineffective with momentary stress.

Scholars have long‐called for researchers to treat coping as a process that is measured over an arc of time. Ambulatory assessment (AA) offers an appealing tool for capturing the dynamic process of adolescent coping. However, challenges in capturing the coping process are not altogether circumvented with AA designs. We conducted a scoping review of the AA literature on adolescent coping and draw from 60 studies to provide an overview of the field. We provide critiques of different AA approaches and highlight benefits and costs associated with various types of measurement within AA. We also speak to considerations of participant burden and compliance. We conclude with recommendations for developmental scholars seeking to deploy AA to capture this quintessential process among adolescents.

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Mobile technologies are omnipresent across adolescent life and require better characterization of their potential benefits. Adolescents also experience high rates of daily stress so that investigating youths’ technology use in relation to their stress response is of practical importance. We employed experience sampling data from a subset of 115 youths ( n = 1,241 time points) who reported on their technology-based coping and assessed how these related to emotion change throughout the day and controlled for important covariates. Models testing for the benefits of moderate use (relative to no or heavy use; i.e., Goldilocks effect) showed a clear pattern of positive effects of moderate coping online, particularly in relation to support seeking and self-distraction. Moderate online coping was adaptive and often fostered declines in negative emotion.