Social media use does not increase individual-based relative deprivation: Evidence from a five-year RI-CLPM

Abstract

Although a growing literature demonstrates that social media usage fosters upward social comparisons, the potential for social media use to elicit perceptions of unjust disadvantage relative to others remains unexplored. We address this oversight by leveraging six annual waves of a nationwide random probability sample of adults (ages 18–99; N = 62,017) to examine the average between- and within-person associations between social media use and feelings of individual-based relative deprivation (IRD) over time. Results from our preregistered analyses revealed that those who are high social media users across time tend to also experience higher levels of IRD. After adjusting for these stable between-person differences, within-person changes in social media use failed to predict changes in IRD over time (or vice versa). Subsequent exploratory analyses replicated these results across different age- and gender-based subgroups. Our results relieve concerns that social media use fosters long-term perceptions of disadvantage over time within individuals and suggest that concerns over the long-term detrimental effects of social media use on social comparison processes may be unfounded. These results also highlight the need to separate between-person stability from within-person change when investigating temporal precedence in longitudinal research.