Discrepancies between Objectively Assessed and Self-Reported Daily Social Media Time in the Age of Platform Swinging

Abstract

Building on Junco’s (2013) study examining the accuracy of self-reported computer-specific time on Facebook, the current study investigates the accuracy of self-reported time on multiple social media (SM) platforms across multiple electronic devices and evaluates whether reporting accuracy is systematically associated with participant sex, individual SM platform in question, or total number of SM platforms used. Participants were 320 college students who downloaded software on their computers, tablets, and smartphones to track their active use of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat over a 2-week surveillance period and then self-reported their daily average minutes on each platform immediately after. Larger proportions of students over- estimated than under-estimated their use, with the largest overestimations found on Snapchat and Instagram. Relative to males, females logged significantly more SM time and were less accurate in reporting. Overall, the likelihood of substantial inaccuracies in reporting total SM time and time on most individual platforms increased with each additional SM platform participants reported using. Findings from this study cast further doubt on the validity of self-report SM measures in the present SM landscape and underscore the need for either data analytic strategies to adjust for systematic reporting biases or a shift towards objective time-tracking methods.

A Qualitative Research on Usage Intention and Platform Swinging Behavior of Anonymous Social Applications “Soul”

“…It was found that information value, social interaction value and self-presentation value had significantly positive impacts on consumers’ brand community-swinging, which further fosters brand loyalty [ 42 ]. Bolye et al examined the accuracy of self-reported computer-specific time on multiple social media platforms and evaluated the influencing factors of reported accuracy based on platform swinging context [ 43 ]. Zhang et al investigated how Chinese journalists navigate multiple social media platforms and employ data-driven source as complements to traditional source in practices during COVID-19.…”

Digital communication technologies and mental health

“…First, in most empirical studies we exclusively relied on self-report measures for assessing technology usage. However, self-report measures do not correlate strongly with non-obtrusive log data of smartphones and SNS (Boyle et al, 2022;Ernala et al, 2020;P. H. Lee et al, 2021;Marengo et al, 2021;Parry et al, 2021;Rozgonjuk, Pruunsild, et al, 2020).…”