Abstract
This study investigated the effects of active private, passive private, and passive public social media use on adolescents’ affective well-being. Intensive longitudinal data (34,930 assessments in total) were collected through a preregistered three-week experience sampling method study among 387 adolescents. N = 1 time series were investigated, using Dynamic Structural Equation Modeling. Findings showed that different types of social media use very rarely yielded different effects within one and the same adolescent: 45% of adolescents experienced no changes in well-being due to any of the three types of social media use, 28% only experienced declines in well-being, and 26% only experienced increases in well-being. Only one adolescent experienced the theoretically expected effect pattern of a positive effect of active private and passive private use and negative effect of passive public use. Together, the findings suggest that the active-passive use dichotomy in social media research is less clear-cut than it might seem.
