Semester 1, academic year 2024/2025
By Qiru Huo
Adolescents’ self-presentation on social media is closely linked to their well-being, though current research indicates that the relationship is complex, with both positive and negative effects. To better understand this relationship, more research is needed to explore specific social media features and content shared. This study focuses primarily on two key features on Instagram: stories, which represent ephemerality affordance, and posts, which represent persistence affordance. In terms of content, the concept of capitalization explains how different sentimental self-presentations on social media influence users’ well-being, as people tend to feel more positive when sharing positive content and vice versa. This study aims to investigate the sentiment distribution in posts and stories shared by adolescents on Instagram and explore how sharing content with varying sentiments impacts their subjective well-being at both the between-person and within-person levels.
This study adopts an innovative mixed method, combining the data donation method with the experience sampling method, using data from a large-scale intensive longitudinal cohort project that has already completed data collection. The data donation method enables measuring participants’ objective social media use by providing access to the specific content of published posts and stories. Multimodal sentiment analysis, using pre-trained and fine-tuned models, will categorize the sentiment of numerous posts and stories included in the data download packages (DDPs). After the sentiment classification of posts and stories, subjective well-being data collected via experience sampling will be incorporated to analyze the short-term impact of sharing content with varying sentiments on adolescents’ well-being.