Individual Patterns in the Association Between Social Media Use and Adolescent Well-being

Research on the association between social media use and youth well-being has begun adopting an individualized paradigm by focusing on the within-person associations between social media use and well-being to provide clarity in a literature characterized by inconsistent findings. We provide a more holistic examination of the individualized nature of the effects of social media on youth well-being by using EMA data from 99 adolescents living in the United States to (1) show the between- and within-person variability in social media harms and benefits related to eight dimensions of well-being and (2) create individualized predictive models of youth well-being using fifteen features of youth’s social media experiences. Across both analyses, we found considerable nuance and variability when examining the interplay between social media use and well-being at an individual level, illustrating the challenges an individualized approach poses to researchers seeking to build a generalizable understanding of social media use and well-being.