Heterogeneity in some relationships between social media use and emerging adults’ affective wellbeing

Group-level studies of the association between social media use and wellbeing in emerging adults have so far yielded mixed and inconsistent results. As a result, recent research has shifted focus towards assessing potential heterogeneity in social media use relationships in youth. In this preregistered study, we aimed to take previous efforts further by incorporating both subjective and objective data, and by including more specific measures of social media use such as how active emerging adults were on social media, and with whom they interacted. While data resolution issues interfered with some of our analyses, our findings suggest that there is heterogeneity in some but not all of the relationships between social media use and emerging adults’ affective wellbeing.