Instant messaging and relationship satisfaction across different ages and cultures

Abstract

Research suggests that using IM is generally beneficial for maintaining personal relationships, yet well-being benefits are likely to be conditional on micro- and macro-level variables. This study investigates the link between IM use and relationship satisfaction across age groups using survey data collected from 19 countries (N = 20,358, age range 18–94, Mage = 41.0, SD = 14.6). The multilevel regression results revealed that (1) overall IM use with strong ties is positively related to individuals' satisfaction with their relationships across all countries and (2) this link is weaker among older people compared to younger ones. The hypothesized cross-level interactions were not statistically significant overall, yet comparing individual countries (e.g., Germany and Indonesia), which are on the opposite ends of the autonomy-embeddedness value dimension, suggests that the use of IM might indeed be more important for relationship satisfaction in more embeddedness-oriented cultures and relationship benefits may be more similar across age groups than in autonomy-oriented cultures. More large-scale cross-cultural studies and multilevel theories are needed to arrive at a more contextualized understanding of IM as a global communication phenomenon.

The effect of social network sites on international students' acculturation, adaptation, and wellbeing

“…Secondly, our findings across both studies speak to the overall generalizability of the reported effects of SNS use on wellbeing across different groups of students. Although previous scholars have suggested that adaptation process may be dependent on the cultural distance between home and host country (e.g., Geeraert et al, 2019), or that the different online platforms that are in use in different societies may have a differential impact (Pang, 2021;Vauclair et al, 2023), our work shows that the psychological processes that underlie the effects are in fact quite similar across different populations, and platforms. The congruence in the observed pattern of relationships among variables is remarkable, especially considering differences in operationalizations between the two studies, and provides a conceptual replication of the results across contexts.…”