In Their Own Words: How Adolescents Differ in Their Social Media Use and How it Affects Them

Despite a burgeoning literature into the relationship between social media use (SMU) and adolescent well-being, clear conclusions about this relationship remain elusive as the literature has yielded a mixed bag of results. The aim of this study is to take a qualitative approach to improve our understanding of individual differences in (a) adolescents’ motives for using SMU, (b) their social media-related mood management, and (c) the effects they experience due to SMU. Based on eight focus groups among 55 adolescents ranging in age from 14 to 17 years, we found considerable homogeneity in adolescents’ motives to turn to social media. But we also found substantial heterogeneity in the moods that predict their SMU, their affective responses to SMU, and the effects they experienced due to SMU. Such sizeable individual differences may, in part, explain the inconsistent results in earlier quantitative work. We end with three lessons for future self-report studies.