The effects of negative social media connotations on subjective wellbeing of an ageing population: A stressor-strain-outcome perspective

Abstract

In recent years, users’ privacy concerns and reluctance to use have posed a challenge for the social media and wellbeing of its users. There is a paucity of research on elderly users’ negative connotations of social media and the way these connotations contribute to developing passive behaviour towards social media use, which, in turn, affects subjective wellbeing. To address this research vacuum we employed the stressor-strain-outcome (SSO) approach to describe the evolution of passive social media use behaviour from the perspective of communication overload, complexity, and privacy. We conceptualized subjective wellbeing as a combination of three components–negative feelings, positive feelings, and life satisfaction. Negative and positive feelings were used to derive an overall affect balance score that fluctuates between ‘unhappiest possible’ and ‘happiest possible’. The proposed research framework was empirically validated through 399 valid responses from elderly social media users. Our findings reveal that communication overload and complexity raise privacy concerns among social media users, which leads to passive usage of social media. This passive social media use improved the subjective wellbeing favourably by lowering negative feelings and raising positive feelings and life satisfaction. The findings also revealed that respondents’ overall affect balance leans towards positive feelings as a consequence of passive social media use. This study contributes to the field of technostress by illuminating how the SSO perspective aid the comprehension of the way passive social media use influences the subjective wellbeing of its users.