Study: Social Media Don't Displace In-Person Hangouts for Teens

Teens who use social media heavily also spend the most in-person time with friends.

A new study strikes a blow to the idea that teenage social media use is obliterating in-person time with friends. According to the new research, published in Computers in Human Behavior, teens who spend a lot of time on social media will also log the most in-person socialization time. Futhermore, the researchers "found no support for the assumption that social media use predicts declines in social skills."

On some level, this isn't surprising. Social teens are social teens, no matter the medium.

But it's fashionable today to blame smartphones for depression and anxiety in teens, and a prominent theory of how this works is that social media crowd out unmediated activities, such as hanging out in person. The new study suggests this theory may miss the mark.

More Social Media, More Offline Socializing

The research was conducted by an international team of academics that included professors at Brown University, the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, the Amsterdam School of Communication Research, and St. Olavs University Hospital. For the study, they collected biennial data about social media use, social skills, and time spent with friends for hundreds of Norwegian children. This information was measured when the kids were ages 10, 12, 14, 16, and 18.

"More time spent with offline friends was concurrently associated with greater social media use at ages 10, 12, and 14 years," report the researchers.

In addition, increased use of social media "positively predicted time spent with friends offline" in the future: "participants who liked, commented, and posted more over time displayed an increase in the number of days they spent with friends offline."

The effects were small but significant, and applied across sexes and age groups.

So contrary to conventional wisdom, teens who start spending more time on social media aren't largely doing it to the exclusion of in-person socializing.

Nor does spending more time on social media seem to make social skills worse. "Increased use of social media was unrelated to future levels of social skills across ages 10–18 years," states the study.

"Our findings…provide preliminary evidence that concern over declining social skills as a result of social media use may be unwarranted," the researchers conclude. "Social media use may even support offline interaction with friends, and thus indirectly promote adolescents' wellbeing and functioning."

No One-Size-Fits-All Script

Increased social media use did predict a decline in social skills among people who already scored high on social anxiety, though the effect was small and only applied to those between ages 12 and 16.

The findings "align with prior research supporting a poor-get-poorer (i.e., rich-get-richer) hypothesis," the researchers explain.

This is interesting because it points to a wider conundrum when it comes to studies of social media use and teen mental health.

Some previous research has shown higher levels of social media use or screen time are correlated with higher levels of mental health problems. A lot of people like to interpret these studies as evidence that social media causes mental problems in teens. But causation could go the other way: Teens suffering from mental health issues, bullying at school, etc. could start using social media more heavily to cope with offline stress.

Maybe online communities actually help troubled teens deal better with their offline stressors. Or maybe there's a circular reinforcement effect going on, with offline troubles leading to more time online and that, in turn, leading to more isolation and negative emotions or behaviors. We just don't know. It's likely different for different teens, depending on their particular circumstances.

This new study serves as an important reminder of this variance. There's no one-size-fits-all script for social media use among teens—which means we should also avoid one-size-fits-all solutions.

For teens who are social and well-adjusted already, social media use may become a fun extension of their in-person social life or spur new friendships that then translate to offline spaces. But for some teens who are already suffering from anxiety or other issues, social media use could prove problematic, exacerbating offline issues.

This is why catchall rules—like laws banning minors from social media use—are both unnecessary and unwise. Such policies could prove helpful to some teens, of no consequence to others, and harmful to still others. That's why the people best positioned to understand the way a particular teenager relates to social media, and to set more boundaries should problems arise, are that teen's parents or other adults close to them, not distant lawmakers looking for blanket solutions.

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Today's Image

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I recently came across my senior photo—and since today's newsletter is all about teens, I'll share it with you. Why they had me pose like I'm about to flash somebody in an alley, I don't know. What I do know is that coat came from the Delia's catalogue, I still own it, and it's held up astonishingly well.