I am very excited that our ESM study on adolescents’ social media and friendship closeness has been published in @APA’s journal Developmental Psychology. Together with @pmvalkenburg, @IneBeyens, @IrenevanDriel & @LoesKeijsers, I investigated the following: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2021-14131-010

2/n In line with the stimulation hypothesis, previous empirical studies and reviews point at positive cross-sectional and longitudinal associations between social media use and friendship closeness. E.g., see work by @RousseauAnnj, @JacquelineNesi, @Mantheunis

3/n Remaining open questions are:
(1) whether social media use and friendship co-fluctuate in adolescents’ daily lives;
(2) whether there are differences between social media use with versus without close friends;
(3) whether different platforms yield differential effects.

4/n We examined these questions by using 34,930 observations among 387 adolescents from @UvA_AWeSome’s ESM study. We measured adolescents’ social media use and friendship closeness 6x per day for 3 weeks.

5/n Data were analyzed with multi-level analyses to disentangle within-person associations from between-person associations and to shed light on heterogeneity. We thereby respond to recent calls by @JacquelineNesi, @mitch_prinstein, @OrbenAmy, @candice_odgers and many others.

6/n We found that the strength and sign of the within-person association of social media use with friendship closeness varied from adolescent to adolescent

7/n Our work thereby underlines the importance of acknowledging person-specific effects in developmental psychology and media effect theories.

8/n All materials (i.e., pre-registration, syntax, supplemental materials) can be found on OSF: https://osf.io/evsjd/ . The dataset can be found on Figshare: https://doi.org/10.21942/uva.13285685 #OpenScience