User Experience on Social Media between Adolescents and Young Adults

Abstract

Impacts of social media activities on well-being, particularly adolescent mental health has been emerged as a global issue. Although there could be positive benefits from social media activities, potential risk of well-being in adolescent individuals has been reported from the perspective of degraded self-esteem, depression, aggravated social isolation or cyberbullying, anxiety, decreased life satisfaction, or disrupted brain development. However, little of studies on difference of user experience on social media activities between adolescents and young adults have reported. The objective of this study was to compare differences between the two groups on social media involvement measured by time spent a typical day and influence by the degree of subjective happiness, feeling of relative deprivation, vicarious satisfaction, empathy. The survey consisted of questionnaires with several Likert scales. The survey used Qualtrics Online Panels with two age groups, i.e., adolescent group aged from 13 to 17 years old and young adult group aged from 18 to 25 years old in the United States. This study approved by University and Medical Center Institutional Review Board at East Carolina University. The adolescent group participated in the survey with the permission by parents or legal guardians. A total of 1552 participations reviewed to sort out unqualified responses on the basis of attentiveness such as a duration of survey participation time. After applying a duration to completion of survey less than 3.5 minutes, this study analyzed a total of 628 responses, that is, 267 and 361 from adolescent and young adult group, respectively. Mann-Whitney U-Test was applied to evaluate the difference of measures of interest at the significance level of 0.05.The results on social media involvement showed insignificant difference of time spent between the two groups for Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, and X (formally Twitter), but young adult group spent significantly more time than did adolescent group for Facebook. The measures of empathy were significantly different between two groups, but subjective happiness, feeling of relative deprivation, and vicarious satisfaction were not different. Interestingly, young adult group tended to be more sensitive to sharing another person’s feelings, experiences, and emotions than adolescent group did.

Keywords: User Experience, Social Media Use, Adolescents And Young Adults

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1008056