Leveraging Smartphone Sensing to Understand the Daily Influence of Sleep on Online Social Engagement Among Adolescents

• In Event: Sleepless in Adolescence: The Role of Sleep Health on Adolescent Risk-Taking and Functioning

Abstract

Introduction: Social media has received considerable attention in recent years as a proximal risk factor for poor sleep among adolescents. Less research, however, has examined whether poor sleep affects duration or frequency of social media use, especially compared to other forms of online social engagement. Yet, poor sleep impacts cognitive control and emotion regulation, which may make adolescents more likely to engage in social media for asynchronous social interaction or passive scrolling rather than more synchronous or direct online communication (e.g., messages, calls). The current study harnesses innovative smartphone sensing methods to objectively capture social media use and other forms of social communication (calls, texts) to examine whether daily fluctuations in sleep duration and quality predict next-day online social engagement (defined by total screentime and checking frequency).

Hypotheses: It is hypothesized that within-person changes in sleep (i.e., shorter or poorer sleep than usual) will be uniquely associated with higher level of next-day social media use, defined as total daily duration on social media and frequency of checking social media.

Study population: Adolescents (N =19; Mean age = 15.8 years, 37% girls, 79% White) who participated in an intensive monitoring study for one month (M=30.6 days; SD =5.6).

Method: Throughout the intensive monitoring study, adolescents had a phone application (AWARE) installed that passively monitors applications for social media and social communication (messages, calls). Metrics included daily duration of social media and online communication and frequency of checking social media apps. Adolescents self-reported daily sleep duration and quality, which were person-centered to estimate individual fluctuations from each person’s mean. Multilevel models were conducted to examine the association between sleep and next-day engagement in social media and social communication.

Results: Poorer-than-usual and shorter-than-usual sleep predicted greater frequency of checking social media the next day among adolescents (B=-.43, p=.005; B= -3.79, p=.02), but not more daily duration of social media use (B=1.50, p=.15; B= .23, p=.93). There was no effect of sleep quality (B=-.08, p=.73) or duration (B=.25, p=.56) on daily online social communication behaviors.

Conclusion: Findings highlight the importance of evaluating the daily, temporal, and objective associations between sleep and social media. Results indicate that adolescents check social media more frequently when they get less sleep and worse sleep than usual, suggesting that sleep may be a modifiable factor to consider for youth social media engagement. Findings have implications for understanding the impact of potential bi-directional relationship of sleep and social media, with practical and clinical implications for adolescent sleep and mental health.

Authors

• Jessica Leigh Hamilton, Rutgers University - New Brunswick
  Presenting Author

• Saskia Jorgensen, Rutgers University

• Simone I. Boyd, Rutgers University

• Melissa J Dreier, Rutgers University

• Alea Watson, Rutgers University

• Adia Moore, Rutgers University