Drinking Buddies: The Importance of Proximal Norms in Emerging Adults’ Alcohol-Related Private and Public Social Media Use

ABSTRACT

Exposure to alcohol posts on social media has been found to be associated with emerging adults’ alcohol use. An important mechanism through which this association seems to occur are social norms. Thus far, however, research has not differentiated between proximal and distal norms and has not accounted for the private (e.g. Instagram private features, Snapchat) and public media outlets (e.g. Instagram public features) through which these norms might have been constructed. The results of our online survey among emerging adults (N = 789, M_age = 21.46, SD_age = 1.88, 56.4% female), therefore, showed that exposure to alcohol posts on private SNS features in combination with descriptive proximal norms, instead of more public SNS features and distal norms, played an important role in emerging adults’ alcohol use. As such, future research should focus more thoroughly on the interrelations between SNS private features and proximal normative perceptions and try to better understand on which social cues normative perceptions of proximal other’s alcohol consumption are based.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. According to a research report by Sevenhant et al. (2021), 78% of Belgian emerging adults indicated using Instagram daily followed by 50% who used Snapchat daily.

2. For more insight into Snapchat and Instagram private features please see the additional Appendix, Figure A1-A4. Here a visual overview of the specific features is given, which in turn further clarifies how these features are targeted to specific audiences.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by grants from Interne Fondsen KU Leuven / Internal Funds KU Leuven (project 3H190365).