Poster #43 - Youth’s Daily Interactions with Parents and Siblings and Social Media Use: A Diary Study

• In Event: Poster Session 02

Abstract

In an increasingly technology-reliant society, social interactions have evolved to include a mix of face-to-face and virtual interactions (Leung, 2011). Among adolescents, social networking sites (SNSs) serve a large part in how connections are formed and maintained between peers, friends, and family (Wood et al., 2016). Such tech-reliant communication became especially relevant during the novel COVID-19 pandemic, as many youths were confined and restricted to interaction with those who lived in the same home. Thus, virtual interactions became more salient than ever in their lives (Wigg et al., 2020).
Despite permeating everyday life and relationships, especially among youth (Shah et al, 2019), research regarding the predictors of social media use lags. The present study addressed this gap by analyzing the daily associations between positivity and negativity in proximal family relationships (i.e., parent-child and sibling) and youth’s social media use during the COVID-19 pandemic. We expected that negativity in proximal relationships would be positively associated with SNS use, whereas positivity would predict less time using SNSs. This hypothesis is supported by research which suggests SNSs as a source of social compensation (Barker, 2012) and more recent research which found SNSs to be popular coping mechanisms for adolescents during the COVID-19 pandemic (Cauberghe et al., 2021).
Participants included one parent and two adolescent-aged children from 682 families (2,046 participants) participating in an ongoing longitudinal study. Older siblings (51% female) averaged 16.59 (SD = .71) years old, younger siblings (48% female) averaged 14.09 (SD = 1.12) years, and parents (85% mothers) averaged 46.29 (SD = 5.15) years. Data for this study were collected in Fall 2020. Two data collection procedures were utilized: First, parents and adolescents provided information on their relationships and adjustment through annual web-based surveys. Second, in the month following the annual survey, youth completed a series of four weekend diaries (eight daily assessments) reporting on their daily relationship qualities (Furman & Burhmester, 2009) and time spent activities (measured in hours), including social media use. Multi-level modeling, disaggregating between- and within- person effects (Hoffman & Stawski, 2009), was used to test the daily associations between youth’s proximal relationship qualities and social media use.
Consistent with a compensation perspective, results showed that between-person parent-child negativity was positively linked with youth’s social media usage, whereas between-person parent-child positivity was negatively associated with youth’s social media use (see Table 1). In contrast, youth’s within-person positivity with siblings was positively associated with social media use. In other words, on days in which youth reported more positivity in their sibling relationship as compared to their personal average, they spent more time on social media.
Discussion highlights the ever-growing presence of social media in adolescent social connectedness through the lens of family relationships, a significant contributor to wellbeing (Feinberg et al., 2012). The importance and placement of parent as well as sibling relationships across the adolescent transition to a more peer-centered social framework will be discussed, along with potential implications of SNS use in adolescence.

Group Authors

Leslie Page, Shawn D. Whiteman

Authors

• Leslie Page, Utah State University
  Presenting Author

• Shawn D Whiteman, Utah State University