Adolescents’ Cultural Contexts and Competencies across Digital Landscapes

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Abstract

The proliferation of digital media and its role in fostering adolescents’ relationships with peers, autonomy development, and identity exploration is well documented. Digital media (e.g., smartphones, computers, social media, etc.) afford adolescents with unique opportunities to foster social and emotional connections with peers and family, exchange content, and explore new ideas (Giedd, 2020). As of 2021, adolescents engage with digital media for almost 8 hours and 40 minutes on average every day (Rideout et al., 2022), suggesting that digital media may have an influential role in adolescents’ development. Much work examining the associations between adolescent digital media use and proximal outcomes has relied on cross-sectional, retrospective self-reports of screen time, and garnered null, small, and mixed effects. As such, researchers have called for increasing methodological rigor by specifying adolescents’ individual differences, momentary contexts, and exact digital behaviors (e.g., Orben, 2020; Odgers et al., 2020; Nesi et al., 2018). Accordingly, this paper symposium integrates work utilizing complex analytical approaches (e.g., ecological momentary assessment, semi-structured interviews, smartphone screenshots) to examine how specific digital behavior (e.g., prosocial behavior, interacting with family, objectively-measured screen time, smartphone pickups, notifications) impacts the development (e.g., queer identity construction) and psychological functioning (e.g., depression, anxiety, momentary affect) of culturally and racially diverse adolescents across the United States and Perú. In all, these investigations underscore the centrality of culture in influencing the behavior and experiences of adolescents as they navigate their ever-evolving digital landscapes.

Sub Unit

• Technology, Media & Child Development

Chair

• Shedrick Lamar Garrett, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Individual Presentations

• Digital Familism: Individual Differences in how Adolescents’ Digital Interactions with Family relate to their Momentary Affect - Presenting Author: Shedrick Lamar Garrett, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Emma Armstrong-Carter, Stanford University; Amy Xu, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Mitchell J Prinstein, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Eva H Telzer, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

• Adolescent media use and wellbeing during the COVID-19 pandemic in Latinx and Latin American adolescents - Victoria Guazzelli Williamson, University of Oregon; Estelle L. Berger, University of Oregon; Jennifer H. Pfeifer, University of Oregon; Ron E Dahl, University of California, Berkeley; Presenting Author: Lucía Magis-Weinberg, University of Washington

• Social media as tools for identity development among Latine and White LGBTQ+ youth - Presenting Author: Zachary Allen Keith, University of California - Santa Cruz; Adriana Maria Manago, University of California - Santa Cruz; Mars Garcia, University of California, Santa Cruz

• Describing adolescents’ objectively-measured daily smartphone use and thoughts about social media - Elizabeth Nick, Vanderbilt University; Ann-Christin Haag, Columbia University, Teachers College; Benjamin W Nelson, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Shedrick Lamar Garrett, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Presenting Author: Kara Anne Fox, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Eva H Telzer, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Mitchell J Prinstein, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill