Youth social media usage for emotion regulation

Mixed Methods | 2023

The Problem

Despite popular media attention on the negative impacts of social media on youth mental health [1], the US Surgeon General and experts agree that these effects cannot be understood through aggregate quantitative measures alone [2]. Individual factors such as demographic background, pre-existing mental health conditions, and support from the community are just some of the many factors that must be carefully examined [3]. In the HCI community especially, there is renewed interest in the role of platform design on youth social media experiences [4].

New methods of research and inquiry are necessary to understand nuanced factors from both sides of the interaction: the fluctuating emotional states of teenagers on social media, as well as the platform features and affordances that teens interact with. In this collaborative three-part mixed methods study, I worked as one of the lead researchers and supervisors to investigate teens’ moment-by-moment emotional states on Instagram. Our research questions were as follows:

  1. How do teens describe their moment-by-moment interactions and emotional states on Instagram?

  2. What real-time strategies do teens use to manage their emotions when navigating Instagram?

This project was a collaboration across three departments at the University of Washington: the Information School, Department of Psychology, and School of Computer Science & Engineering.

Process

First, we invited participants to group sessions where they received an overview of the study and a brief mindfulness training exercise. The purpose of this exercise was to equip teens with the skills and vocabulary necessary for the emotion labeling tasks in the rest of the study. Participants were also instructed to install a custom Android app developed by the team for Phase 2.

We conducted over 26 in-depth qualitative user interviews that included emotion labeling, contextual inquiry, and “guided tours”. Participants were asked to navigate to specific features on Instagram and walk through their thought process. Some parts of the interview asked them to imagine how they feel when using their feature in day-to-day use, while other questions were more speculative or reflective.

Participants were instructed to use Instagram as they usually did for seven days. The EMA app asked them to fill out an emotion labeling task and survey every 5 minutes that also included questions about what activities they were engaging in on Instagram.

After completing the study, participants filled out a post-study surveys that included quantitative and qualitative questions. The team analyzed quantitative responses from before and after the study to investigate whether the study served as an intervention.

Key Findings

  • Public narratives describe social media experiences as harmful and negative for youth, but participants explained that a vast majority of their experiences were characterized by bland content and emotions. Though this may seem benign, further research is necessary to understand whether these may actually be positive or negative coping systems.

  • Reactive strategies include quickly scrolling away or liking content, whereas proactive ones include customizing notification settings. Studying more of these mechanisms and their motivations may be key to understanding what teens actually want versus what platforms are currently providing.

  • Our findings alone may seem unsurprising, but our study is one of the first to highlight the mundaneness of youth social media experiences. Researchers and practitioners should adopt similar techniques to understand nuances and develop better policies to make social media usage more meaningful for youth.