Social media use and friendship closeness in adolescents’ daily lives: An experience sampling study.

Abstract

The formation and maintenance of friendship closeness is an important developmental task in adolescence. To obtain insight in real-time processes that may underly the development of friendship closeness in middle adolescence, this preregistered experience sampling study [ESM] investigated the effects of social media use on friendship closeness. The study was conducted among 387 adolescents (54% girls; M age ϭ 14.11 years; 96% Dutch) from different educational tracks (44% lower prevocational secondary education, 31% intermediate general secondary education, 26% academic preparatory education). Adolescents reported six times per day for 3 weeks on their Instagram, WhatsApp, and Snapchat use in the previous hour and their momentary experiences of friendship closeness (126 assessments; 34,930 observations). Multilevel analyses revealed positive between-person associations of friendship closeness with general WhatsApp use and Instagram use with close friends. In contrast, at the within-person level, we found small negative overall associations of general WhatsApp use and Instagram use (with and without close friends) with friendship closeness. However, there was large heterogeneity in the personspecific effect sizes of the within-person associations of social media use with friendship closeness. For example, person-specific effect sizes of the association of Instagram use with close friends with friendship closeness ranged from ␤ ϭ Ϫ.745 to ␤ ϭ .697. These results underline the importance of acknowledging person-specific effects in developmental and media effect theories.

Some Socially Poor But Also Some Socially Rich Adolescents Feel Closer to Their Friends After Using Social Media

“…Adolescents who experienced more friendship closeness across the ESM assessments also reported more closeness across the follow-up assessments. Finally, as reported in Pouwels et al 19 , adolescents who more frequently used social media with friends felt more close to their friends than adolescents who used social media less frequently (i.e., positive between-person correlation). However, adolescents felt less close to their friends when they had used social media with friends in the previous hour than when they had not used social media with friends (i.e., negative within-person correlation).…”

“…This is now increasingly being recognized as problematic, as it may lead to flawed or even opposing conclusions with regard to the within-person effect 12,21,22 . For instance, our recent work has shown that social media use was positively related to friendship closeness at the between-person level, but negatively at the within-person level 19 . In the present study, we therefore investigated how social media use affects friendship closeness within each adolescent.…”

“…To pit the rich-get-richer and poor-get-richer hypotheses against one another, the present study in part conducted a secondary data-analysis of an ESM study by Pouwels et al 19 . This previous study revealed substantial heterogeneity in the sign and strength of the short-term effect of social media use with friends on friendship closeness.…”

“…This previous study revealed substantial heterogeneity in the sign and strength of the short-term effect of social media use with friends on friendship closeness. The present study tested the rich-get-richer and poor-get-richer hypotheses and thereby incorporated a different theoretical framework than the study by Pouwels et al 19 . Specifically, we extended the previous study by investigating (a) whether and to what extent the short-term effects of social media use on friendship closeness depend on friendship support and loneliness, (b) whether the short-term effects of social media use on friendship closeness were related to socially rich and poor adolescents' longer-term change in friendship closeness across three months, and (c) heterogeneity in the short-term and longer-term effects within subgroups of socially rich and poor adolescents.…”

“…Adolescents with high levels of friendship support and low levels of loneliness can be considered as socially rich, whereas adolescents with low levels of friendship support and high levels of loneliness can be considered as socially poor. We focused on the three most popular social media platforms (i.e., Instagram, Snapchat, and WhatsApp) that adolescents use to communicate with their close friends 5,19,20 .…”