Adolescent screen use trajectories and daily psychosocial functioning in emerging adulthood: a multi-timeframe design

Adolescent screen use is highly heterogeneous, varying across dimensions such as activity type, time spent, purpose, and content exposure, with patterns that may persist or shift over time. However, little is known about how such heterogeneity relates to later psychosocial functioning in everyday life. This study addressed this gap by examining longitudinal trajectories of screen time and media content engagement across adolescence and their associations with day-to-day psychosocial functioning in emerging adulthood. Data were drawn from the Zurich Project on Social Development from Childhood to Adulthood (z-proso) and its add-on study, Decades-to-Minutes (D2M), which employed ecological momentary assessment (EMA). Parallel latent class growth analysis modelled trajectories of three screen activities (ages 11,13,15,17) and three types of media content exposure (ages 13,15,17,20) in z-proso (n=1521). Daily psychosocial functioning was assessed in the D2M sample at ages 21 (n=255) and 27 (n=451), and associations with adolescent screen-use trajectories were examined using dynamic structural equation modelling (DSEM). Results showed that youth in the high TV/DVD and chatting/surfing, moderate-content group exhibited higher mean levels and variability of daily aggression and aggressive reactivity. The high-use, high-content group displayed greater daily cannabis use, aggressive reactivity, and provocation inertia. The moderate-use, escalating-content group showed higher stress variability, aggression inertia, aggressive reactivity, and cannabis use. The low-use, low-content group consistently displayed the most adaptive daily functioning. These findings underscore the importance of jointly considering adolescent screen time and media content patterns, given the distinct relations of different joint trajectories to (mal-)adaptive dimensions of psychosocial functioning into adulthood.