Young Adults’ Information Needs, Use, and Understanding in the Context of Instagram: A Multi-Method Study

Abstract

The use of information has changed in recent years—particularly among young adults, for whom social media are now the most important gateway to engage with news and various other types of information. Focusing on Instagram, this multi-method research project takes an audience-centered approach and investigates how young adults use the platform for (which kind of) information, the information needs that guide their use, and the contextual dynamics that shape their understandings of “information (use).” Empirically, the study builds on a combination of a seven-day diary study with semi-structured qualitative interviews with 48 German Instagram users aged 18 to 24. Analyzing the diaries in conjunction with the interview transcripts allowed us to gain rich insights into information usage practices and how these are influenced by the characteristics of (audiovisual) social media platforms as well as the motives and needs of using them. The findings suggest that Instagram is an integral part of young adults’ information repertoires, although information is usually not actively sought. Moreover, platform characteristics and affordances not only shape possible and actual information behaviors but also matter for whether participants understand their Instagram use as information use.

Keywords:

• Social media
• mobile media
• information use
• Instagram
• diary method
• qualitative interviews

Disclosure Statement

We have no conflicts of interest to disclose.

Notes

1 To ensure that no content from third parties was shared without their consent, participants were specifically asked to not send screenshots from private accounts (e.g., accounts from their friends or family).

2 Investigating users’ definition of ‘information (use)’ unavoidably creates a dilemma: On the one hand, there is the risk of some interviewees merely repeating the concept that was offered to them during the briefing. On the other hand, refraining from a briefing might introduce other problems: Particularly if participants associated ‘information’ with ‘news,’ this may have been a reflection of their self-concepts or of their perceived duty to be an “informed citizen” (e.g., Hartley and Pedersen 2019; Ytre-Arne and Moe 2018).

3 According to the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2019 (Newman et al. 2019), 26% of female and 20% of male German online users used Instagram for any purpose in 2019. Likewise, 8% of female users, but only 4% of male users indicated to use Instagram for news. Thus, the goal was to recruit slightly more women than men for our study.

4 When referring to participants, we use the letter P for participant and the number assigned to each participant according to the document Overview-Participants.pdf provided on OSF.