Longitudinal Effects of Digital Interactions on Adolescent Social Competence

It remains unclear whether online communication improves or diminishes adolescents’ social skills. While longitudinal studies favor improvement, they do not separate within- and between-person effects, which precludes causal interpretations. Moreover, few studies consider that communication with different people may have different impacts. This preregistered longitudinal study examined how the frequency of online communication with offline friends and online acquaintances (i.e., people known exclusively from the internet) impacts adolescents’ social self-efficacy. Survey data were collected from 2,500 11-16-year-olds (M = 13.43, SD = 1.70; 50.0% girls) over three waves (June 2021-June 2022) and analyzed with random intercept cross-lagged panel models. Contrary to the hypotheses, we found no evidence that changes in online communication frequency predict changes in social self-efficacy (or vice versa), regardless of the communication partner. Nevertheless, socially self-efficacious adolescents communicate more online, though only with offline friends. This implies that talking to online acquaintances is similarly accessible for adolescents with varying social skills.