Dataset on Adolescent Stress Coping and Social Media Use in the Context of Social Isolation

This dataset contains de-identified, item-level online survey responses from 466 adolescents and emerging adults (ages 12–26) collected to examine whether social isolation is associated with stress coping, whether this relationship is mediated by negative emotions, and whether social media use intensity buffers the negative link between negative emotions and coping (i.e., a moderated mediation framework), with an additional exploratory focus on a potential inverted U-shaped association between daily social media time and coping. The file includes coarsened demographics (e.g., gender, age group, education group, region group, urban/rural), social media behavior indicators (e.g., multi-platform use, preferred platform indicators, friends category, daily time category), and item-level scores for four scales: Social Isolation (6 items), Negative Emotions/DASS-21 (21 items), Social Media Use Intensity (6 items), and Coping Style (20 items; positive and negative coping), along with computed construct scores (e.g., SI, NE_mean, SMU, SCP, SCN, and an overall coping index SC) documented in the codebook for reproducibility. To protect participant privacy (including minors), fine-grained geographic identifiers and open-text fields are excluded and key demographic variables are aggregated; the dataset is suitable for reproducing the reported models (e.g., moderated mediation via regression/PROCESS-equivalent methods), conducting psychometric checks, and performing secondary analyses of digital media use, emotion, and coping processes.