Social Media Use and Alcohol Consumption: A 10-Year Systematic Review

Abstract

Many studies have looked at the relationship between social media and alcohol consumption. There is a need for a comprehensive review that synthesizes the results of past research to systematically understand the relationship between social media use and alcohol consumption. The present systematic literature review synthesizes the findings from global social media and alcohol use studies (n = 206, 204 retained for analysis) between 2009 and 2019. Codes included type of study, methods, use of theory, and whether and how the relationship between social media and alcohol use was tested, among others. In addition to providing descriptive findings, the current study compared the findings across studies that primarily focused on advertising and marketing, self-generated user-generated content (UGC), other-generated UGC, social media uses and affordances, and a mixture of more than one type of content/focus. Most articles used quantitative methods (77.94%), which is followed by qualitative methods (15.20%), mixed methods (6.37%), and 0.49% that did not fit in any of the methods categories. Of the studies that tested the relationship between social media use and alcohol consumption, an overwhelming majority found that relationship to be positive (93.10%). The results of the present study provide a comprehensive understanding of past findings regarding social media and alcohol consumption and provide important future research suggestions.