Can social media literacy contribute to adolescents' mental well-being? Developing a conceptual framework for the socialization of social media literacy and its role in mitigating adversarial social media effects

The current society increasingly highlights the importance for adolescents to use social media in a media literate way. That is because of widespread public concerns on adolescents’ avid use of social media platforms. Social media are also often considered harmful for adolescents’ well-being, even though research investigating this has largely produced inconsistent results. Yet, scholars and policy makers alike have put social media literacy forward as a promising solution for the dominant role that social media platforms play in adolescents’ daily lives. Social media literacy can be described as cognitive and affective competencies that help to navigate social media platforms in a healthy way. Generally, social media literacy is expected to challenge the risks inherent to social media usage and is thus assumed to interact with social media effects, however this widespread assumption has largely remained unexplored. This lack of research is surprising given the extensive implementation of social media literacy programs in school curricula. Fundamental understandings of social media literacy’s impact on social media effects thus seemed needed to justify society’s support for such programs. So far though, the social media literacy and social media effects literature lacked a close integration and social media literacy emerged as a fragmented concept with no detailed attempts to theoretically define and characterize it in regard to the social media effects it intends to enhance versus prevent.   

Accordingly, the first goal of this PhD project was to develop a theoretical framework on the role of social media literacy in the social media effects literature. The first chapter introduces this novel theoretical framework, also called the Social Media Literacy (SMILE) model which integrates media (literacy), social psychology, interpersonal communication and educational theories. The model puts forward five assumptions, part of which relate to the theorized empowerment process and the other part relates to the theorized development process. The empowerment process seeks to explain the role of social media literacy in the links between social media behavior and adolescent mental well-being and specifically considers how social media literacy may minimize social media risks and maximize opportunities. The development process aims to understand the ways through which adolescents can acquire social media literacy and considers which socialization agents foster social media literacy and how they operate simultaneously.

The second goal of this dissertation was to provide empirical validation for the proposed theoretical framework by testing its assumptions against the background of one area of social media effects: the social media positivity bias, also known as social media users’ conveyance of highly positive lifestyles, successes and/or attractive appearances to their audience. In order to adequately test the SMILE-model’s assumptions for the positivity bias, valid and reliable instruments were needed to address a) social media literacy on this bias, b) socialization agents’ mediation of social media literacy, c) engagement in unauthentic positivity-biased self-presentation behaviors and d) different interactions with positive social media content. Such instruments were missing in the literature at the initial stage of the PhD dissertation, which is why a rigorous methodological approach to scale development was adopted. The second chapter describes in detail the scale development process for the instruments to measure interactions with positive social media content. To develop these instruments but also the other instruments, data of focus groups (6 groups, N = 22), in-depth interviews (N = 35), a cross-sectional survey study (N = 586), two waves of a longitudinal survey study (NW1 = 1895, Nanalyses = 1419) and a second cross-sectional survey study (N = 542) were used.

The third chapter was an empirical test of the first assumption of the empowerment process, that social media literacy acts as a moderator in the relation between social media use and well-being. The chapter specifically investigated the moderating role of social media literacy in the within-person longitudinal associations between exposure to positive social media content, social comparison and the affective responses of envy and inspiration, drawing on a longitudinal survey study with three data waves (NW1 = 1895, Nanalyses = 1032). It was found that the within-person longitudinal association between social comparison and envy only occurred for those adolescents with low levels of affective social media literacy. Adolescents with high levels of affective social media literacy did not feel increased envy after increased social comparisons.

The fourth chapter empirically explored the second assumption of the empowerment process of the SMILE-model, which argues that social media literacy acts as a predictor. More concretely, this chapter investigated social media literacy’s power in predicting the extent to which an adolescent engages in unauthentic positively-biased self-presentation behaviors and how these kind of behaviors relate to adolescents’ self-esteem. This chapter also drew on the data of the longitudinal survey study (NW1 = 1895, Nanalyses = 1032). No support was found for within-person longitudinal associations between positively-biased self-presentation behaviors and self-esteem. Within-person longitudinal associations did occur between cognitive social media literacy and positivity-biased behaviors, yet in the opposite direction of what was expected. An adolescent who displayed more critical knowledge than usually, engaged more in unauthentic positively-biased self-presentation on social media, later in time. This unexpected finding is discussed in light of peer dynamics characterizing social media interactions. In addition, it was found that adolescents with higher levels of affective social media literacy engaged less in unauthentic positively-biased self-presentation behaviors and displayed more self-esteem.

Two assumptions of the development process of the SMILE-model were tested in the fifth chapter: the assumption on reciprocal processes and the assumption on differential learning processes. Based on the first two waves of the longitudinal survey study (NW1 = 1895, Nanalyses = 1007), this chapter explored the longitudinal relations between parental and peer mediation and cognitive and affective social media literacy. Reciprocal associations were found between active parental mediation on the positivity bias and one cognitive social media literacy dimension, awareness of the presence of the positivity bias, over time. Active parental mediation also predicted affective social media literacy over time. No associations were found between active peer mediation and social media literacy.

The current PhD dissertation thus sought to contribute to a theoretical and empirical underpinning for the fast developing literature on social media literacy. The findings highlight the importance of affective social media literacy. Apart from knowledge transmission, current social media literacy education programs and intervention packages should also focus on adolescents’ emotions in their social media interactions and help them manage these in an adaptive way. Furthermore, the role of parents may not be underestimated. Governmental initiatives could be set up to encourage parents to take up an active role in helping their children navigate social media by staying abreast of their social media activities and talking to them about their social media experiences and related emotions.