Tempting triggers The effects of adolescents’ social media use on distraction, task delay, and sleep

Smartphones have changed the way humans interact with the world. This change poses serious challenges to regulating one’s smartphone use alongside other daily activities, especially for adolescents who are in a developmental stage marked by reduced parental regulation and still immature self-regulation. Consequently, societal concern around the impact of social media and smartphone use on adolescents’ everyday functioning is growing. However, surprisingly little scientific research has been dedicated to investigating the direct effects of social media use on adolescents’ attention required for everyday functioning. Therefore, this dissertation aims, in four empirical chapters (Chapters 2-5), to investigate how adolescents’ social media and smartphone use affect their distraction, task delay, and sleep quality, and to explore how the effects on distraction and task delay may differ from adolescent to adolescent.
This dissertation relies on data from a large intensive longitudinal data collection, including two experience sampling method (ESM) bursts (fielded in December 2019 and June 2020), and smartphone tracking data (June 2020). In both ESM bursts, adolescents received six surveys per day for 21 consecutive days, measuring their social media use (time spent), distraction, and task delay over the past hour, as well as last night’s sleep quality. In total, this resulted in more than 55,000 completed experience sampling surveys and over 750,000 smartphone tracking observations among 383 different adolescents. Together, the research findings yield three important conclusions: 1) the effect of social media use on distraction is strong, 2) the effect of social media use on distraction is universal, and 3) smartphone-related task delay and sleep impairments are dependent on the person, the timing, and the app that is used.