https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6207-6367
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ABSTRACT
There is a pressing need to understand whether using social media might be linked to mental health and if yes, how. The findings of this study (N = 475) show that individuals who received more Likes on social media posts reported more friend support. However, what matters to mental health is the level of expectancy violation of the number of received Likes. The two dimensions of expectancy violation of receiving Likes (number vs. responder) have different effects on the outcome variables. Theoretical and practical implications about how social media influences friend support and mental health for young adults are discussed.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Professor Hsuan-Ting Chen, Professor Lindsay Young, and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback on earlier versions of the manuscript.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Supplementary Material
Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/08838151.2022.2087654.
Notes
1 According to statistics provided by the Hong Kong University Grants Committee (UGC, Citation2018), in the academic year 2016–2017, 46.3% of the students enrolled in UGC-funded programs are male. The classrooms sampled have 34.05% male students, on average. See Supplemental Materials for the sampling details.
2 I ran a post hoc analysis by replacing the average scores of the three posts as the independent variable with the last post only and found that the results remain the same.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Jack Lipei Tang
Jack Lipei Tang (M.Phil., Chinese University of Hong Kong) is a Ph.D. candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. His research interests include digital activism, social networks, and computational social science.