Self-esteem, social comparison, and Facebook use

Abstract

Facebook use is very popular among young people, but many open issues remain regarding the individual traits that are antecedents of different behaviours enacted online. This study aimed to investigate whether the relationship between self-esteem and the amount of time on Facebook could be mediated by a tendency towards social comparison. Moreover, three different modalities of Facebook use were distinguished, i.e., social interaction, simulation, and search for relations. Because of gender differences in technology use and social comparison, the mediation models were tested separately for males and females. Data were collected by means of a self-report questionnaire with a sample of 250 undergraduate and graduate Italian students (mean age: 22.18 years). The relations were examined empirically by means of four structural equation models. The results revealed the role of orientation to social comparison in mediating the relations between low self-esteem and some indicators of Facebook use, i.e., daily hours on Facebook and the use of Facebook for simulation. For females, the use of Facebook for social interaction was directly influenced by high self-esteem and indirectly influenced by low self-esteem. Globally, the dimension of social comparison on Facebook emerged as more important for females than for males.

The Effect of Parenting Style in Junior High School Adolescent’s Self-Esteem

“…Adolescent with low self-esteem interested in social comparison, which related to greater amount of time spent on Facebook, searching information about others. They tend to make social comparisons to simulate different selfimage from reality and anxious about the response of their posts in total of likes or retweets in social media [11]. In this study self-esteem and social media wasn't related which might due to different types of social media.…”

“…Level of self-esteem is influenced by treatment received from significant person especially parents and their respond to failure or success in achievement [5]. Other factors that also contribute to self-esteem are parenting styles [6], socioeconomic status [7], parents' education level [8], gender [9], genetic [10], social media [11], psychiatric disorders and chronic diseases [12,13].…”

Is Big Data Security Essential for Students to Understand?

“…Third-party applications often appear in the form of quizzes, games, character reading, who I am in the future, even photo editing that tempt users to click on a user license agreement (Kozlowska, 2018). Activities of the younger generation like the most today are related to self-actualization on social media (Bergagna & Tartaglia, 2018) and they tend to trust product based on visual appearance (Permatasari & Kartikowati, 2018). Based on these observations, the respondents do not understand well the risks when entering their personal data into third-party applications.…”

“I Don’t Feel Like the Odd One”: Utilizing Content Analysis to Compare the Effects of Social Media Use on Well-Being Among Sexual Minority and Nonminority US Young Adults

“…This form of social comparison has been consistently described as a risk factor for negative mental health outcomes. [34][35][36][37] In addition, "envy" was also coded more frequently in the responses of our LGB participants. Previous research found that jealousy and envy on SM may behave as potential mediators in the relationship between SM use and negative mental health outcomes.…”