Online Peer Engagement in Adolescence

Positive and Negative Aspects of Online Social Interaction

Nejra Van Zalk, Claire P. Monks

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429887406
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría en psicología

This book provides an in-depth insight into what is currently known and relatively unknown about youths' online peer engagement. It delivers state-of-the-art current reviews of the literature in the field, with a strong coverage of methodological issues in studying online friendships and an emphasis on moving towards a new, less dichotomic, view of online peer interaction in adolescence.

With a focus on what spending time with online-exclusive peers entails – in terms of both potential positive as well as negative consequences for friendship quality, intimacy, and well-being – this book offers a more nuanced commentary on youths' online peer engagement. Including coverage of the evolution of online friendships, cyberbullying, cyberdating, sexting, online abuse, smartphones, social networks, as well as their impact on adolescent social interaction online, Van Zalk and Monks consider implications for future research directions and practical applications.

Online Peer Engagement in Adolescence is important reading for undergraduate and master students studying social and developmental psychology, education, relationships and health, as well as advanced researchers and academics working in these fields.

1 Online peer engagement in adolescence

Moving away from “good vs. bad” to brave new frameworks

Nejra Van Zalk

Social interaction as we know it is undergoing increasingly rapid changes, perhaps especially so for young people. Everything we thought we knew about friendships, relationships or spending time with others has radically changed in the past decades – for people in their everyday lives, but also for researchers, whose struggle to keep up with this quick-paced social revolution has been obvious in the seemingly slow-paced delivery of frequently contradictory findings. For those of us who remember when the internet was accessible via noisy modems connected to desktop computers, or when chatrooms were something you had to deliberately “connect to”, it might be difficult to grasp the way young people’s social spheres today have seamlessly expanded into a state of constant connectivity. A common way of distinguishing between online and offline interactions in the literature is to differentiate between “real-world” versus online exchanges. Yet, this distinction resonates rather hollow these days as most people would agree that communication, whether online or face to face, is perceived as “real”. Indeed, to be young today, almost everywhere in the world, is to be connected to others nearly 24/7. Global estimations suggest that 70% of young people aged 15–24 have access to the internet, and many use it to form and maintain friendships (UNICEF, 2017). Smartphones became available during the 1990s and there was a huge growth in social media use with the launch of Facebook in 2004, followed by an explosion in large social platforms including Twitter (2006), Instagram (2010) and Snapchat (2011), to name a few of the larger ones. As digital technologies (referring to the internet, social media, virtual reality, etc.) have become more accessible and faster to access for adolescents, they have permeated social interactions in significant ways. Many adolescents today have grown up using digital technologies as the main instrument of social communication, and peer engagement as the older generations know it has forever transformed.

With more than 2 billion people owning a smartphone around the world (Poushter, 2016), the time of being away from social contacts when coming home from school is long gone; friends as well as bullies are always there via social media, instant messages/chats, and other means of synchronous and asynchronous communication. This is reflected around the globe, as people self-reported spending an average of 135 minutes per day on social media in 2017 (Statista, 2018). Nevertheless, at the time of writing, it is difficult to avoid reading about the perils of online social activities for young people. As indicated by a recent report by the British Parliament, besides a number of dangers adolescents face by being online including harmful content (e.g., pornography), contact (e.g., radicalization or unwanted sexual attention), conduct (e.g., cyberbullying and trolling) and commercial risks (e.g., hidden costs in games; Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology [POST], 2019), young people also risk developing compulsive/addictive behaviours if socializing excessively online (LaRose, Eastin, & Gregg, 2001; Sun et al., 2005; van den Eijnden, Meerkerk, Vermulst, Spijkerman, & Engels, 2008; Ybarra, Alexander, & Mitchell, 2005). In a review of the literature regarding the effects on cognitive processes, smartphone use has been implicated as a factor contributing to dwindling attention spans (Wilmer, Sherman, & Chein, 2017). Popular science literature is littered with calamitous reports of what happens when people in general, and young people in particular, spend too much time online. Books now tell us that the internet is a place that generates psychological distance in offline social interactions (Turkle, 2011), and creates behavioural addictions that keep us hooked (Alter, 2018). We are also told that the internet changes our brains (Carr, 2011), and that the tech revolution is a likely reason that today’s teenagers (generation iGen) have all kinds of problems (Twenge, 2017). Although no official analysis of the sort exists to my knowledge, one might venture a guess about the predominance of negative reports regarding consequences of online communication. It is perhaps no wonder that while this social evolution is taking place and negative research findings trickle down into popular media, parents and other concerned adults feel a sense of alarm. Research has identified common fears parents and concerned adults have about how mobile technologies are influencing children, including safety, social development, cognitive performance, and sleep (George & Odgers, 2015). Nevertheless, as the authors point out, most of these online threats are also paralleled offline (George & Odgers, 2015). So should we really be concerned about adolescent peer engagement merely because it no longer resembles social interactions as we used to know them? More importantly, can adolescent online peer engagement be boiled down to a simple matter of “good” versus “bad”? The purpose of this chapter is not to refute any particular effects of online peer engagement on young people’s mental health, be they positive or negative. Instead, the aim is to push for research on more useful ways of thinking about online peer engagement that helps avoid the bias of polarization.

The polarization in online peer engagement research

One important concern about young people’s online communication is that it might impact their well-being as it deters from face-to-face interpersonal exchanges. It has hardly escaped anyone’s notice seeing teenagers fully absorbed on their smartphones, introducing terms such as “smartphone zombie” to the common vernacular (although this behaviour is far from only embraced by young people exclusively). Fifty-four percent of American adolescents reportedly spend too much time on their phones, with two-thirds of their parents being concerned (Jiang, 2018). One core theoretical framework in the literature is the displacement hypothesis (Valkenburg & Peter, 2007), where the assumption is that the time in front of screens socializing with others might instead be spent with “real” people or devoting oneself to useful hobbies or studying. On the other side of the displacement spectrum are the proponents of digital utopianism, where online activities are seen as means of further expanding and enhancing the human experience (Dickel & Schrape, 2017). This opposition in views has been mirrored among scholars, where questions of technological advances are often framed using a good versus bad dichotomy (Orben & Przybylski, 2019a), and online technology has often been seen in terms of contradictions – as a “social connector and separator” (Waytz & Gray, 2018, p. 474). This dichotomy likely stems from disparity in findings, where a vast amount of cross-sectional data points to negative correlations between online peer engagement and poor mental health outcomes on the one hand, or no such links on the other.

For instance, an ample literature on adolescents as well as adults suggests that social networking, under certain conditions, increases poor mental health (Guernsey, 2014; Morrison & Gore, 2010; Selfhout, Branje, Delsing, ter Bogt, & Meeus, 2009), reduces participation in meaningful activities and face-to-face relationships (Leung & Lee, 2005), and negatively impacts well-being (Kross et al., 2013; Selfhout et al., 2009; van den Eijnden et al., 2008). High levels of Facebook engagement, such as via likes or status updates, have been linked to decreases in well-being over time (Shakya & Christakis, 2017). Facebook depression, defined as the overuse of Facebook leading to depression, has garnered academic and media controversy from its inception, and subsequent findings have provided mixed support (Chow & Wan, 2017; Guernsey, 2014). Individuals sharing physical spaces with their attentions diverted to their individual devices (e.g., Turkle, 2011) has become a prominent feature of academic and popular discourse, and innovative terms have emerged to describe newfangled social phenomena. For instance, technoference refers to the ways in which smartphone use intrudes in everyday social interactions among romantic couples (McDaniel & Coyne, 2016) and within families (McDaniel & Radesky, 2018); whereas phubbing/Pphubbing, refers to the means people and romantic partners, respectively, ignore one another by the use of phones (Roberts & David, 2016). Recently discovered processes include fear of missing out (or FOMO), characterized by the requirement for constant connectivity (Przybylski, Murayama, DeHaan, & Gladwell, 2013); as well as nomophobia, or the fear of being without a mobile device (King et al., 2013) – though it is unclear how the latter is distinguished from social anxiety and requires more research. These negative findings from the peer-reviewed literature, often skewed in the popular media, can easily create the notion that the internet is a horrible place from which we should protect young people.

Nevertheless, research also demonstrates that online social communication can be beneficial in terms of positive impact on well-being and social connectedness (e.g., Kim & Lee, 2011; Nabi, Prestin, & So, 2013). Although Facebook users report feeling worse over time with increased use, they do not show negative effects when interacting with others “directly” (Kross et al., 2013). Similarly, even though a higher level of Facebook use is associated with decreases in life satisfaction due to lowered offline relationship satisfaction, it also results in enhanced well-being because of online relationship satisfaction (Hu, Kim, Siwek, & Wilder, 2017). In addition, passive scrolling through one’s Facebook feed rather than active use leads to decline in affective well-being (Verduyn et al., 2015) and predicts social comparison and envy (Appel, Gerlach, & Crusius, 2016). Thus, depending on the context and the behavioural characteristics of the individual, and if used as a tool, online social communication can help boost current and future social relationships with close and peripheral friends (Sbarra, Briskin, & Slatcher, 2019), and improve sociability when offline engagement is problematic (Waytz & Gray, 2018). If social networking is used to replace face-to-face social interactions, however, it might instead have negative consequences in terms of increased loneliness (Nowland, Necka, & Cacioppo, 2017) and reduced sociability when replacing deep offline relationships (Waytz & Gray, 2018).

The current state of research, often grounded in the aforementioned good vs. bad factions, can be seen as a sort of moral panic akin to that of related debates such as whether video games cause aggression (Ferguson & Colwell, 2017). Moral panics of this type tend to emphasize novel forms of media that have not yet been incorporated by everyone in society – particularly among older adults (Ferguson & Colwell, 2017). As a best-case scenario, the knowledge gaps in the current literature represent real problems for the scientific community to catch up with the exponential developments in online communication, with much data quickly becoming outdated with the advances of new forums, applications, and technologies. As a worst-case scenario, however, it might be a sign that researchers are not always willing to explore the notion that young people find meaningful ways of communicating over and above what is considered traditional or expected social engagement. Avoiding these so-called Goldilocks effects (Ferguson & Colwell, 2017), wherein each generation believes their own media use is “just right” in terms of moral restrictions, is crucial in order to understand more about adolescent online peer engagement today. In addition, discussing the effects of online communication as categorically good or bad creates a false dichotomy, and scholars have proposed that lack of social engagement (or missing out) is not the same thing as spending most of the time in virtual social communication (Sbarra et al., 2019). Informed predictions of ever-increasing complexity of largely virtual future social interactions, which are likely to happen in the near future (Anderson & Rainie, 2018), demand studying such processes in a non-categorical way to help develop more precise theoretical frameworks. Regrettably, psychology has a long-standing tradition of refutationism, where studies destroying an earlier theoretical position are assigned greater originality and value compared to studies that modify or improve existing ideas (Kahneman, 1991). With psychology’s replication crisis (Lilienfeld, 2017) still looming in the background, it is more important than ever to raise the bar on the quality of research before disseminating findings that might create a sense of panic among the concerned public.

Recent work into adolescent digital technology use demonstrates more nuance, however. Scholars have debated the problematic use of large-scale datasets to explore the links between digital technologies and well-being, as such datasets tend to include many variables and observations explored in analytically flexible ways and might result in false positives and contradictory findings (Orben & Przybylski, 2019a). The majority of studies rely on cross-sectional rather than longitudinal data (Heffer, Good, Daly, MacDonell, & Willoughby, 2019), despite change being the only constant in the study of online peer engagement. In addition, research into mental health and technology, such as smartphone addiction, tends to rely heavily on self-reports rather than actual behaviour (Ellis, Kaye, Wilcockson, & Ryding, 2018). In one meta-analysis, the authors analysed three large sets of data with more than 350,000 participants in total, and found that the link between adolescent digital technology use and well-being was negative but very small – explaining only 0.4% of the variance in psychological well-being (Orben & Przybylski, 2019a). This means that the link between digital technology and psychological well-being in adolescence can be mainly explained by other factors. Similarly, using data from three large datasets comprising more than 17,000 participants, the authors found little evidence for negative links between screen time and well-being for adolescents (Orben & Przybylski, 2019b). The findings demonstrate the importance of moving beyond measuring screen time as self-reported hours spent engaging with a digital device to include other types of estimates, such as time-use diaries (Orben & Przybylski, 2019b). Responding to a previously published cross-sectional study where the authors concluded that social media leads to becoming depressed (Twenge, Joiner, Rogers, & Martin, 2018), one study examined these effects longitudinally (Heffer et al., 2019). Following up two adolescent samples over two and six years, respectively, the authors found that social media did not predict depressive symptoms – but rather the other way around. That is, the more adolescents were depressed, the more their social media use increased (Heffer et al., 2019). Another recent commentary also criticized the aforementioned findings by Twenge et al. (2018) by raising a number of methodological flaws, including poor measurement and statistical analyses, trivial correlations between main variables, and subsequent problematic interpretation of results – the latter of which could cause unwarranted concern for the general public (Ophir, Lipshits-Braziler, & Rosenberg, 2019). Nuanced studies and meta-analyses are of absolute necessity if the field is to move away from thinking about digital interactions as inherently good or bad, and instead create frameworks that help explain for whom online socializing is beneficial and under which conditions.

Online peer engagement: where do we go from here?

Seminal work in psychology has demonstrated that human beings have a strong innate need to belong, which can be operationalized as a basic motivation (Baumeister & Leary, 1995), whereas social isolation is a strong predictor of mortality (even compared to smoking several cigarettes per day; Holt-Lunstad, Smith, & Layton, 2010). Adolescence, and especially early adolescence, is characterized by a need to form intimate friendships (Bukowski, Newcomb, & Hartup, 1996) – perhaps more so than during other developmental phases. Adolescent online peer engagement today is largely an extension of already existing forms of interactions, as they use it to keep in touch with friends and family (Subrahmanyam & Greenfield, 2008). Indeed, although this discussion is beyond the scope of the current chapter, separating online from offline interactions these days is becoming increasingly difficult, as most people interact with loved ones as well as unknown people both face to face as well as via devices and platforms. Thus, to study peer relationships today should be about embracing their complexity. This requires distinguishing between online-exclusive, offline-exclusive, and conjoint friendship networks for instance – the latter of which refers to an overlap between online and offline social networks. Conjoint friendships have not been studied systematically on a large scale, as most studies ignore the considerable overlap between online and offline social n...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• 1. Online peer engagement in adolescence: Moving away from “good vs. bad” to brave new frameworks
• 2. Buddies, friends, and followers: The evolution of online friendships
• 3. Adolescent online friendships: The poor get poorer, or the rich get richer?
• 4. Is online peer engagement bad for all youth all of the time? The benefits and perils of online peer interactions
• 5. Cyberbullying: A changing phenomenon
• 6. Links between online communication and compulsive internet use in adolescence: Is there a reason to worry?
• 7. Cyberdating abuse and sexting in adolescence
• 8. “Digital adolescence”: The effects of smartphones and social networking technologies on adolescents’ well-being
• 9. Applying developmental theory to adolescent peer influence processes in the social media context
• 10. Adolescent relationships in a digital age: What do we know and where does the future lie?
• Index