Emerging adults’ social media engagement & alcohol misuse: A multidimensional, person-centered analysis of risk

• Published in: Children and youth services review 2024-04, Vol.159, p.107511, Article 107511
• Main Authors: Scott, Carol F., Bay-Cheng, Laina Y., Nochajski, Thomas H., Lorraine Collins, R.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Alcohol use; Binge drinking; Emerging adults; Latent profile analysis; Screen time; Social media engagement; Social media use
• ISSN: 0190-7409; 1873-7765
• DOI: 10.1016/j.childyouth.2024.107511

•Conducted latent profile analyses of emerging adults' social media use.•Distinguishedscreen time from engagement and general from alcohol-related.•Various forms of engagement seem to matter more than screen time.•The highest active engagers online might be the most at-risk for alcohol misuse. Nearly all U.S. emerging adults use social media at least daily, and most discuss their offline activities online, including their alcohol misuse. As a result, developing evidence finds a correlation between social media use and offline alcohol drinking, suggesting that social media may be a novel risk factor for alcohol misuse. However, there are conflicting findings about what specific function of social media use is risker – does the amount of time spent online or the types of online activities matter more? Our multidisciplinary team of human–computer interactionists, social workers, and public health scholars aimed to refine our understanding of the association between emerging adult social media use and alcohol misuse. To do so, we conceptualized social media use as a multidimensional construct, examining how much time emerging adults spend online (i.e., screen time) and their different online activities (i.e., social media engagement, such as posting pictures or reacting to posted content [e.g., liking shared pictures]). Taking this conceptualization a step further, we distinguished general online activities (i.e., general social media engagement, such as sharing pictures of food) from those explicitly related to offline alcohol consumption (i.e., alcohol-related social media engagement, such as sharing a video of someone drinking alcohol at a party). Finally, we examined if different levels of these three conceptualizations of social media use were risk factors for alcohol misuse and related negative consequences. We collected survey data from 249 emerging adults on Amazon Mechanical Turk. Using latent profile analyses, we attempted to distinguish the different ways we conceptualized social media use (i.e., screen time from general social media engagement and alcohol-related social media engagement.) We then examined whether significant differences existed between identified profiles and various alcohol-related outcomes in a typical and heavy drinking week. We identified 3-profile solutions for both screen time (low, medium, and high) and general social media engagement (minimum, moderate, and high) and a 2-profile solution for alcohol-related social media eng