“The New Social Landscape: Relationships among Social Media Use, Social Skills, and Offline Friendships from Age 10–18 Years”, Silje Steinsbekk, Oda Bjørklund, Patti Valkenburg, Jacqueline Nesi, Lars Wichstrøm2024-07 (; similar)⁠:

Social media has created a new social landscape for adolescents. Knowledge is needed on how this landscape shapes adolescents’ social skills and time spent with friends, as these outcomes are important to mental health and psychosocial functioning.

Using 5 waves of biennially collected data from a birth cohort [Trondheim Early Secure Study (TESS)] assessed throughout age 10–18 years (n = 812), we found that increased social media use predicted:

more time with friends offline but was unrelated to future changes in social skills. Age and sex did not moderate these associations but increased social media use predicted declined social skills among those high in social anxiety symptoms.

The findings suggest that social media use may neither harm nor benefit the development of social skills and may promote, rather than displace, offline interaction with friends during adolescence. However, increased social media use may pose a risk for reduced social skills in socially anxious individuals.

…2.2.1. Social media use

Social media use was assessed by semi-structured interviews conducted by the same trained personnel at all measurement points. Participants were asked about platforms used, overall frequency of use, and specific social media behavior. The main outcome constitutes the monthly sum of liking, commenting, and posting, which captured the participants’ responses to the following questions: (1) ‘How often do you like other’s updates?’; (2) ‘How often do you write comments to other’s updates or photos?’; (3) ‘How often do you post (written) updates on your own social media sites?’; (4) ‘How often do you post photos’? At ages 16 and 18, we also asked (5) ‘How often do you post selfies?’. The questions were not specific to certain social media platforms, but as the participants were interviewed, the interviewers would provide examples of social media sites if needed, or in other ways facilitate a correct recall (eg. ‘If you think about last week…’).

We also validated our main analysis and tested whether the results were replicated when using an alternative means of measuring the frequency of social media use, captured by interview at ages 10, 12, and 14 (total frequency of checking social media per day) and objectively measured at ages 16 and 18 (daily time spent on social media apps according to the phone’s screen time application). For details, see Online Material (Sensitivity analyses).

…Because the remaining two moderators (symptoms of social anxiety and closeness to friends) are continuous variables, the potential impact of these was examined by adding an interaction term to the main RI-CLPM models (Speyer et al 2023). In these models, interactions were composed of the within-person centered predictor (social media use) and the observed time-varying moderator (Speyer et al 2023) (symptoms of anxiety and friendship closeness, respectively), thus capturing the interaction between changes in social media use and the individual’s overall level of the moderator in question.

…2.2.5. Social anxiety: To assess symptoms of social anxiety, parents and children were interviewed separately using the Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Assessment (CAPA) (Angold & Costello2000) at ages 10, 12 and 14 years. CAPA is based on the diagnostic criteria of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) and interviewers posed mandatory and optional follow-up questions until they had enough information to decide whether a social anxiety symptom was present or not, if reported by either child or parent. At age 16, symptoms of social anxiety were assessed by the Norwegian version of the Schedule for Affective Disorders and Schizophrenia for School-Aged Children (K-SADS) (Kaufman et al 199727ya), and as in former waves, participants and parents were separately interviewed. K-SADS is based on DSM-5, but social anxiety contains the same two symptoms in both editions of the DSM, and here we applied counts of the number of symptoms of social anxiety. Raters blind to all information recoded 77 of the CAPA videotapes and 114 of the K-SADS audiotapes, revealing an inter-rater reliability of ICC = 0.78 for the former and 0.96 for the latter.

…As a final step of the main analyses, we tested whether symptoms of social anxiety and friendship closeness moderated the cross-lagged relations (Table 2; summary statistics are displayed in Table S2, Online material). Because the model did not converge when examining all interaction terms in one model, each interaction was added separately such that each model only included one interaction term predicting the outcome at one time point (eg. social media × social anxiety at T4 predicting social skills at T5).

From age 12–14 and 14–16 years, the interaction term between social media use and the intercept (ie. overall level) of social anxiety was negative and statistically-significant, indicating that increased social media use forecasted a small decline in social skills among those with higher levels of social anxiety symptoms (12–14 years: β = −0.11, 95% CI = −0.19, −0.02, p = 0.016, β = −0.12; 14–16 years: β = −0.07, 95% CI = −0.15, −0.00, p = 0.040, β = −0.06), and from age 16–18 only, this also applied to those reporting more friendship closeness (β = −0.09, 95% CI = −0.18 to −0.00, p = 0.040, β = −0.19). No moderation effects were evident for the time spent with offline friends as the outcome.

…Neither sex nor age affected the relationship between social media use and the two outcomes in question but increased social media use predicted declined social skills in youth with more social anxiety symptoms (from age 12–14 and 14–16 years), though effects were small (β = −0.12; β = −0.06, respectively).