Identifying Relevant Dimensions to the Measurement of Adolescent Social Media Experience via Focus Groups With Young People, 2023

While work on the relationship between social media use and adolescent mental health has allowed for some progress, research in this area is still relatively new and shows mixed evidence. This is partly the consequence of a rapidly changing field, resulting in conceptualisation and measurement issues that hinder progress. Given the need for robust conceptualisation, the present study included five focus groups with a total of 26 adolescents aged 11-15 in Northwest England, to understand their experiences, motivations, and perceptions of social media use, relating to mental health and wellbeing. Reflexive thematic analysis was used to analyse the transcripts. We developed three themes and 14 sub-themes. Young people discussed key motivations for using social media (theme 1) relating to social connections, keeping up-to-date, mood management, the ‘default’ activity, freedom to express and develop myself, and fitting in. They shared some of the benefits and positive experiences of social media use (theme 2) such as feeling connected, validation and reassurance, and enjoyment and supporting a sense of self, and finally, they talked about negative experiences of social media use (theme 3), including platform risks, loss of control, social conflict, social comparison, and self-presentation management. Our findings have contributed to our understanding of the salient dimensions and language to inform the development of an adolescent social media experience measure related to mental health.