Transformation of Adolescent Peer Relations in the Social Media Context: Part 2—Application to Peer Group Processes and Future Directions for Research

Abstract

As social media use becomes increasingly widespread among adolescents, research in this area has accumulated rapidly. Researchers have shown a growing interest in the impact of social media on adolescents' peer experiences, including the ways that the social media context shapes a variety of peer relations constructs. This paper represents Part 2 of a two-part theoretical review. In this review, we offer a new model for understanding the transformative role of social media in adolescents' peer experiences, with the goal of stimulating future empirical work that is grounded in theory. The transformation framework suggests that the features of the social media context transform adolescents' peer experiences by changing their frequency or immediacy, amplifying demands, altering their qualitative nature, and/or offering new opportunities for compensatory or novel behaviors. In the current paper, we consider the ways that social media may transform peer relations constructs that often occur at the group level. Our review focuses on three key constructs: peer victimization, peer status, and peer influence. We selectively review and highlight existing evidence for the transformation of these domains through social media. In addition, we discuss methodological considerations and key conceptual principles for future work. The current framework offers a new theoretical perspective through which peer relations researchers may consider adolescent social media use.

Associations of Traditional and Peer Cyber-Victimization With Adolescents’ Internet Use: A Latent Profile Analysis

“…Coping motives refer to using Internet to forget about problems and to cheer oneself up when in bad mood, while conformity motives refer to Internet use to be liked by others and not being excluded (Bischof-Kastner et al, 2014). The fact that traditional victims reported to favor these kind of motives further supports the hypothesis that youth who are target of peer victimization in their offline life may tend to use the Internet to escape from their negative face-to-face experiences and related distress, on the one hand, and to try to fit in, enhance their social status, and feel accepted in a peer group, on the other one (Nesi, Choukas-Bradley, & Prinstein, 2018). It remains unclear whether these victims are actually able to satisfy these specific needs in their online life or, conversely, continue to encounter problems in relationships with peers and, in the most negative cases, begin to suffer also from cyber-victimization becoming dual victims.…”

Passive social networking site use and well-being: The mediating roles of social comparison and the fear of missing out

“…Moreover, both self-perceived social acceptance and physical appearance may be hurt by quantifiable indices of approval that are rampant on SNSs. For example, a filtered, appearance-enhancing post depicting a positive social event that receives many "likes" may be especially likely to evoke social comparisons and consequently hurt self-perceived social acceptance and/or physical appearance (e.g., Nesi, Choukas-Bradley, & Prinstein, 2018). To our knowledge, only one study has examined the links between these self-perceptions and SNS social comparisons, which found that Facebook upward social comparisons is associated with poorer self-perceived physical appearance and social acceptance (de Vries & Kühne, 2015).…”

Assessing Online and Offline Adolescent Social Skills: Development and Validation of the Real and Electronic Communication Skills Questionnaire

“…In addition, questions arise as to whether online social competence may be transferred to offline social competence, or whether different contexts (i.e., online and offline) may be associated with differences in patterns of social competence. 51 In this regard, the RECS is the first tool to create a bridge between the overarching constructs of offline and online social competence, as well as to quantify the relationship between offline and online social skills. As young people keep being more and more connected, 52 this bridge may allow future studies to investigate the importance of social competence in online contexts.…”