Me, My Self-Presentations and I: Within-Person Associations Between Narcissism, Social Media Use and Peer Attachment

ABSTRACT

Although the relationship between social media and narcissism in adolescents has been widely studied, the direction of this link remains unclear to date. This is striking given the potential deconstructive consequences of narcissism for adolescents’ peer relationships. Therefore, this three-wave panel study (N_W1 = 1032) aimed to examine whether increases in adolescents’ narcissism levels are (reciprocally) related to increases in posting positive self-presentations on the one hand, and to decreases in peer attachment on the other hand. Although narcissism was significantly and positively related to both posting positive self-presentations and peer attachment at the between-person level, these findings were not replicated at the within-person level. At the latter level, only the cross-lagged relationship of narcissism predicting an adolescent’s tendency to post appearance-related self-presentations on social media was significant. Multiple group tests for sex and receiving positive feedback on one’s self-presentations showed no differences in these within-person associations.

Disclosure Statement

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

Notes

1. In Flanders, secondary schools refer to all grades after primary school.

2. This study is part of a larger project on adolescents’ social media usage, environment and well-being. The project has various research objectives which are not the focus of this paper. Different studies are thus part of this project to address all research objectives. Therefore, other studies draw on the same analytical sample, but examine completely different associations (e.g., Devos et al., 2023; Schreurs & Vandenbosch, 2022b, 2022c; Schreurs et al., 2022). Please contact the authors for more information and see https://osf.io/kgf3z/ for the project website.

3. In the oral/written instructions, adolescents were explained what was meant with “most public social media platform”. This refers to applications through which posts can be viewed by relatively many people including friends, acquaintances, and sometimes also strangers (Schreurs & Vandenbosch, 2022a).

4. Note that the appearance factor of the posting scale was also used in a different paper of the authors that draws on the same analytical sample. Accordingly, these correlation estimates are the same as in Schreurs & Vandenbosch (2022c).

Additional information

Funding

The data collection was supported by the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO-Vlaanderen) under Grant [11D3119N]. The work forces were supported by the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO-Vlaanderen) under Grant [11G2723N] and Grant [1201624N].