Mapping adolescent social media use: A scoping review

Research on the impact of social media use on adolescent mental health lacks consensus, likely exacerbated by the field’s reliance on coarse measures like time spent online. More granular conceptualisations of use have been proposed as a way to clarify when, why, and for whom social media use may be beneficial, neutral, or harmful. In this scoping review, we used the Multidimensional Model of Social Media Use (Yang et al., 2021) as a framework to systematically map the diversity of adolescent social media use. Specifically, we examined how adolescents describe their social media use, how researchers quantify this use and the degree of (dis)alignment between the two. In total, we reviewed 6,822 articles for inclusion, with 522 meeting the inclusion criteria. Adolescents’ qualitative accounts portrayed social media use as complex, fluid, and multi dimensional, involving a wide range of activities, motivational functions, and communication partners. We draw on these accounts to extend the Multidimensional Model, specifying more precise categories of activity, motivation, and communication partner, and incorporating additional contextual dimensions that characterise adolescents’ social media use. Mapping quantitative studies onto this framework revealed broad conceptual overlap but substantial methodological fragmentation, including heterogeneous and often unvalidated measures. The extended framework developed through this review provides a more precise foundation for future empirical work examining links between social media use and mental health and highlights the need for research designs capable of capturing the dynamic nature of adolescent social media use. Assessing adolescents’ views on the framework represents an important next step.