Objective, subjective, and accurate reporting of social media use: No evidence that daily social media use correlates with personality traits, motivational states, or well-being

There is a lively debate on the effects of social media use, shaped by self-reported measurements of social media use. However, self-reports have been shown to suffer from low accuracy compared to logged measures of social media use. Even though it is unclear how problematic that measurement error is for our inferences, many scholars call for the exclusive use of ‘objective’ measures. But if measurement error is not systematic, self-reports will still be informative. In contrast, if there is systematic error, associations between social media use and other variables, including well-being, are likely biased. Here, we report an exploratory five day experience sampling study among 96 participants (N = 435) to understand factors that could relate to low accuracy. First, we asked what stable individual differences are related to low accuracy. Second, we explored what daily states relate to accuracy. Third, we explored whether accuracy relates to well-being. Although we did find evidence for a systematic tendency to overestimate social media use, neither individual differences nor daily states were related to that tendency. Accuracy was also unrelated to well-being. Our result suggest that blindly calling for objective measures foregoes a responsibility to understand measurement error in social media use first.

当前关于社交媒体使用影响的研究中，存在一场热烈的争论，这一争论受到社交媒体使用自我报告测量的影响。然而，与社交媒体使用的日志测量相比，自我报告已被证明准确性较低。尽管尚不清楚这种测量误差对我们推断的影响程度如何，许多学者呼吁仅使用‘客观’的测量方法。但若测量误差非系统性，自我报告仍具有一定的信息价值。相反，若存在系统性误差，社交媒体使用与其他变量，包括幸福感之间的关系可能会产生偏差。在此，我们报告了一项针对96名参与者（N=435）的为期五天的经验抽样研究，旨在探究可能导致低准确性的相关因素。首先，我们探讨了与低准确性相关的稳定个体差异。其次，我们研究了与准确性相关的日常状态。第三，我们探讨了准确性是否与幸福感相关。尽管我们发现存在系统性高估社交媒体使用的倾向，但个体差异和日常状态与这一倾向并无关联。准确性也与幸福感无关。我们的研究结果暗示，盲目呼吁使用客观测量方法，忽略了首先理解社交媒体使用中测量误差的责任。