The malleability narrative in contemporary media: Its content and consequences for adolescents’ identity development

Although progress has been made in explaining how media dynamics influence adolescent identity, there has been insufficient theory to fully grasp the processes that explain and predict these relationships. The proposed research aims to help addressing this major gap by unfolding an interdisciplinary understanding of how mediated ideals operate, i.e., the malleability narrative. More precisely, I aim to describe the manifestation of multiple, malleable mediated ideals in content analytical research and to conceptualize novel constructs in the explanatory model on media/adolescent well-being from a malleability perspective. To test the explanatory power of these novel mechanisms, multimethod research will be used. Moreover, the combination of insights from diary and longitudinal research will allow to expand the dynamic nature of media effects for the first time from just addressing reciprocity to hypothesizing differential relations depending on the selected time lag.