What’s In a Post? Adolescents’ Social Media Response Motivations, Perceptions of Response Motivations, and the Role of Individual Characteristics

Abstract

As the questions of ‘why’ and ‘how’ adolescents use social media are more informative for understanding socio-emotional outcomes than the amount of time spent on social media, there have been recent calls for experimental studies of youths’ social media experiences. In the present studies, I examined what responses adolescents hoped to receive from others, and the degree to which other users could detect these wanted responses from their social media posts and the characteristics of youth associated with such motivations and perceptions. I further examined the themes, linguistic features, and emotional valence adolescents included in their social media content, and examined relations between the generated content and the characteristics of posters associated with motivations and perceptions. Adolescents (ages 13-16; N=103) participated in a simulated Instagram task where they created social media posts and indicated the degree to which they hoped to receive engagement, advice, support, or entertainment from others for each post, as well as the level of insight they felt they had into their own motivations. Adolescents reported wanting others to engage and be entertained more than they wanted to receive advice and support. Adolescents’ individual characteristics (i.e., social media use, peer relationships, empathy, mood, and emotion regulation) differentially related to what they hoped to receive from others. In a second phase, adolescents (ages 13-17; N = 88) viewed posts from others and rated what they felt the poster had hoped to receive. While the posters’ report and viewers’ ratings correlated, for all response options, adolescent viewers perceived that the poster wanted less of a response than the poster indicated wanting. In the content analysis (816 posts, N = 102), adolescents tended to create social media content that included little to no emotion words, disclosed very little/nothing to a moderate amount of personal information, was literal in its communicative intent, and tended to convey a congruent affect between caption and picture. These features suggest adolescents tend to create social media posts that are consistent with social media norms to avoid emotional posting or disclosing sensitive information to large online audiences. Adolescents’ individual characteristics (i.e., empathy, online and offline peer experiences, emotion regulation skills, mood, and social media use) were associated with their created social media content. Together findings highlight the variability in motivations for social media use based on adolescents’ characteristics and suggest a mismatch between motivations from posters and perceptions from online viewers. This work adds to a growing body of literature examining how adolescents navigate their complex, and increasingly online, communicative interactions.