Two friends meeting up after school to make some TikTok videos together or a young person scrolling through videos late into the night: they use the same social medium, but you can imagine that the effects are very different. 'Some young people feel extra connected to others through those platforms, while others start to feel lonelier,' Pouwels says. 'And for many young people, there are no specifically positive or negative effects to their social media use.'
'If your offline relationships flatten out and you get into arguments with your parents, for example, because you spend too much time on social media: that might have a negative effect. But it can also give you access to networks worldwide or make you feel like you belong somewhere.' To get a better picture of the varied effects, Pouwels will use questionnaires to track the social media use of young people in the first two years of high school over the next few years. In doing so, she will look specifically at the effects of social media on young people's sense of social belonging.
Who is the most popular?
Over a period of three weeks and six times a day, young people will be asked to complete a short questionnaire about their social media activity. ‘Among other things, we want to know if they used social media in the last hour, what they did and whether it made them feel positive or negative. In addition to these daily lists, Pouwels will also administer annual questionnaires. In those questionnaires, she questions young people more extensively, including about their own social position and that of their classmates. 'We want to get a picture of who is seen as popular.' The results are also shared with teachers so they can get a picture of the social landscape in the classroom. We ourselves look at how the offline situation relates to behavior on social media. To what extent does someone's social position offline match someone's position online?'
Pouwels wants to link the questionnaires to personal social media archives. 'On social media, you can download a historical overview of all your activities - likes, comments, posts and DMs,' Pouwels says. 'I'm going to ask young people if they want to share these overviews with me. This data source is a nice addition to the questionnaires. It allows us to see how much time young people spend on social media and how many people they are in contact with. That also says something about the level of connectedness young people experience online.' The data are first anonymized, so that scientists only gain insight into the social media activities and connections, but not the content.
Concerned parents
The social media that young people use can change relatively quickly; for example, young people have been abandoning X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook for years. Isn't Pouwels worried that her results will be outdated by the end of her research? 'Developments do indeed follow each other in rapid succession, which is why we focus more on general characteristics of platforms. Is a platform used for live interaction through video calls or can you think about responses longer through a chat function? Do young people send messages that persist, like posts on Instagram, or do they quickly disappear again, like on Snapchat?
Pouwels emphasizes how much fun it is to study such a current, dynamic topic. 'It strikes me how well young people sometimes know when social media is or is not good for them. Some honestly say they spend too much time on it. Working with the young people themselves, Pouwels hopes to contribute to tailored advice on social media use. 'In which teachers or parents can warn about possible risks of social media, but also not have to be immediately worried if their child is on TikTok again.'
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