Political Extremity, Social Media Use, Social Support, and Well-Being for Emerging Adults During the 2016 Presidential Election Campaign

Abstract

The 2016 U.S. presidential election was marked by hostile political discourse, often on social media, where users were exposed to divergent, and potentially distressing, political discourse. This research explores the effects of this election on the well-being of emerging adults who receive the majority of their news via social media. Using data from the Emerging Adulthood Measured at Multiple Institutions 2 Study, we expected greater social media use to be associated with greater perceived stress, and lower well-being, among emerging adults who are more politically extreme, and expected these relationships would be moderated by social support and social media use. Our preregistered analysis did not support our hypotheses. Although there were some effects of extremity on stress and well-being, overall the direction of the effects were inconsistent and neither social media use nor social support was found to moderate the effects of extremity on stress and well-being.

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“…Although there were certainly some bumps along the road, the project generally indicated to us that registered reports with secondary data are not only possible but that they are desirable. Some of the considerations that arose in the five papers in this collection included how to fit measurement models (Faas et al, 2020), conducting power analyses when using subgroups of unknown size (Chalk et al, 2020), analyses based on multilevel models when the amount of variance at each level is not known (Grahe et al, 2020), creating a reasonable set of alternative models to compare to the target model (Barlett et al, 2020), and creating indices from items without knowing how well they will hang together (Leighton et al, 2020). In all cases, authors needed not only to rely on the best possible prior information to make informed decisions but also to think through different contingency plans if that prior information did not comport with reality.…”

Registered Reports with Developmental and Secondary Data: Some Brief Observations and Introduction to the Special Issue

“…Although there were certainly some bumps along the road, the project generally indicated to us that registered reports with secondary data are not only possible, but that they are desirable. Some of the considerations that arose in the five papers in this collection included how to fit measurement models (Faas et al, 2020), conducting power analyses when using subgroups of unknown size (Chalk et al, 2020), analyses based on multi-level models when the amount of variance at each level is not known (Grahe et al, 2020), creating a reasonable set of alternative models to compare to the target model (Barlett et al, 2020), and creating indices from items without knowing how well they will hang together (Leighton et al, 2020). In all cases, authors needed to rely on the best possible prior information to make informed decisions, but also to think through different contingency plans if that prior information did not comport with reality.…”