Dataset Information

Friendship quality in adolescence: the role of social media features, online social support and e-motions.

ABSTRACT: The last decade has seen a growing interest in understanding what role social media play in adolescent experiences, including friendship relationships. However, little is known about the associations of specific characteristics of social media and individual factors with friendship quality. This study was designed in line with the tenets of the so-called Transformation Framework (Nesi et al., 2018) with the aim of testing whether and how social media features, online social support, and online expressions of emotions play a role in adolescents' friendship quality. Participants were 744 Italian adolescents (64.5% females) with an average age of 15.9 years (SD = 1.31). First, a path analysis was conducted to test the hypothesized model on the whole sample of adolescents. Finally, two multi-group analyses (MGA) were conducted to analyze differences across gender groups (female vs. male) and group of social media users (problematic vs. non-problematic). Path analysis yielded a complex pattern of associations, in which different perceived social media features were significantly associated with different dimensions of friendship quality, both directly and indirectly via perceived online social support and the tendency to express e-motions on social media. Moreover, MGAs confirmed significant differences among both genders and social media users. The findings provide support for the importance of considering social media as a social context with its own characteristics for the study of adolescents' peer experiences, by taking into consideration that the hypothesized role of social media in supporting friendship relations during adolescence may depend on individual factors.

Supplementary information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s12144-022-03564-3.

SUBMITTER: Angelini F

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9465130 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Friendship quality in adolescence: the role of social media features, online social support and e-motions.

Angelini Federica F Marino Claudia C Gini Gianluca G

Current psychology (New Brunswick, N.J.) 20220912

The last decade has seen a growing interest in understanding what role social media play in adolescent experiences, including friendship relationships. However, little is known about the associations of specific characteristics of social media and individual factors with friendship quality. This study was designed in line with the tenets of the so-called <i>Transformation Framework</i> (Nesi et al., 2018) with the aim of testing whether and how social media features, online social support, and o ...[more]

PMID: 36118141

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Project description:Although the structural properties of online social networks have attracted much attention, the properties of the close-knit friendship structures remain an important question. Here, we mainly focus on how these mesoscale structures are affected by the local and global structural properties. Analyzing the data of four large-scale online social networks reveals several common structural properties. It is found that not only the local structures given by the indegree, outdegree, and reciprocal degree distributions follow a similar scaling behavior, the mesoscale structures represented by the distributions of close-knit friendship structures also exhibit a similar scaling law. The degree correlation is very weak over a wide range of the degrees. We propose a simple directed network model that captures the observed properties. The model incorporates two mechanisms: reciprocation and preferential attachment. Through rate equation analysis of our model, the local-scale and mesoscale structural properties are derived. In the local-scale, the same scaling behavior of indegree and outdegree distributions stems from indegree and outdegree of nodes both growing as the same function of the introduction time, and the reciprocal degree distribution also shows the same power-law due to the linear relationship between the reciprocal degree and in/outdegree of nodes. In the mesoscale, the distributions of four closed triples representing close-knit friendship structures are found to exhibit identical power-laws, a behavior attributed to the negligible degree correlations. Intriguingly, all the power-law exponents of the distributions in the local-scale and mesoscale depend only on one global parameter, the mean in/outdegree, while both the mean in/outdegree and the reciprocity together determine the ratio of the reciprocal degree of a node to its in/outdegree. Structural properties of numerical simulated networks are analyzed and compared with each of the four real networks. This work helps understand the interplay between structures on different scales in online social networks.

Dataset Information

Friendship quality in adolescence: the role of social media features, online social support and e-motions.

Supplementary information

Publications

Friendship quality in adolescence: the role of social media features, online social support and e-motions.

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