Social Media Use and Adolescents’ Well-Being: Developing a Typology of Person-Specific Effect Patterns

Abstract

This study investigated the effects of active private, passive private, and passive public social media use on adolescents’ affective well-being. Intensive longitudinal data (34,930 assessments in total) were collected through a preregistered three-week experience sampling method study among 387 adolescents. N = 1 time series were investigated, using Dynamic Structural Equation Modeling. Findings showed that different types of social media use very rarely yielded different effects within one and the same adolescent: 45% of adolescents experienced no changes in well-being due to any of the three types of social media use, 28% only experienced declines in well-being, and 26% only experienced increases in well-being. Only one adolescent experienced the theoretically expected effect pattern of a positive effect of active private and passive private use and negative effect of passive public use. Together, the findings suggest that the active–passive use dichotomy in social media research is less clear-cut than it might seem.