Social media literacy & adolescent social online behavior in Germany

ABSTRACT

The present study addresses the increased merging of adolescents’ online and social practices and provides a broad and developmental conceptualization, operationalization, and empirical investigation of social media literacy as a central resource in their everyday lives. Using a newly developed standardized instrument, the study investigated how different components of adolescents’ social media literacy (knowledge, abilities, and motivation) and aspects of their immediate social contexts (family and peers) influence their level of socially competent online behavior. In an initial empirical study, a large sample of 1,508 secondary school students in Germany (ø 14 years, 66% females) was surveyed in a classic paper-and-pencil setting. The findings confirmed that adolescents’ knowledge, abilities, and motivation positively predicted a higher level of participatory-moral, communicative, and educational behavior, with behavioral motivation playing the most influential role. Moreover, perceived parental mediation and peer communication pressure significantly influenced adolescents’ social behavior online, showing different effects for participatory-moral behavior versus communicative-integrative behavior with friends. The findings reveal that it may be challenging for young users to reconcile different social requirements online. Implications for a preventive promotion of media literacy are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Social media literacy
• online behavior
• adolescents
• parental mediation
• peer communication pressure
• school survey

Acknowledgments

The research leading to these results has received funding from the Vodafone Foundation Germany. I would like to thank the participating schools, teachers and students for their support of my research work. I also would like to thank Dr. Senta Pfaff-Rüdiger for her support in the project, especially when collecting the data.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The term media literacy refers broadly to the interpretation of all mediated symbolic texts (Livingstone, 2003, p. 5). The present study uses the term social media literacy to describe the overall concept, and the term competencies in reference to the described subdimensions.

2. The high proportion of female students is due to the participation of one girls-only school.

3. The original scale by Vossen et al. (2015) was a frequency scale, ranging from “never” to “always.” For the present study, a different format for the answers was applied for consistency.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Vodafone Foundation Germany.

Notes on contributors

Ruth Festl

Ruth Festl is a Senior Researcher at the Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien (Knowledge Media Research Center) in Tübingen, Germany. Her research focuses on the use and effects of digital media, especially among children, adolescents and families. She examines opportunities and risks of growing up in digital worlds. Moreover, she investigates the concept of digital media literacy.