A qualitative exploration of social media and adolescent subjective wellbeing: listening to the voices of young people

With the ongoing increase of adolescents’ media use (Twenge, Martin and Spitzberg, 2018), social media is now intertwined with the daily life of adolescents (Weinstein, 2018). Indeed, half of all ten-year-olds now have a smartphone, and 74 per cent of 12-15-year- olds are allowed to take their phones to bed (Ofcom, 2020). The volume of research in this area has recently grown (Malvini Redden and Way, 2017) and the question of whether social media has a detrimental impact on adolescents has become controversial (Orben and Przybylski, 2019). While many studies have found social media use to have a negative association with wellbeing outcomes (Woods and Scott, 2016; Kelly et al., 2018), other studies have found that social media use can have a positive impact on subjective wellbeing (Kimball and Cohen, 2019; Anderson & Jiang, 2018). Despite the growth in studies, there is a need for more qualitative work (Dubicka and Theodosiou, 2020), specifically listening to the voices of young people themselves.