Social media usage in relation to their peers: Comparing male and female college students' perceptions

Administrators at many higher education institutions are capitalizing on the pervasive use of social media, but there are still disagreements about whether or not the use of social media has a positive impact on college students. With the wide use of social media and its possible effects, understanding students’ perceptions of their own social media usage in reference to their peers has implications for research and practice. With the research paradigm on pluralistic ignorance as a guide, this study used a subset of data from the 2018 online administration of the National Survey of Student Engagement, which contained responses from 5,025 first-year students and 5,487 seniors attending 33 institutions throughout the United States, with a majority being of traditional age (less than 24 years old). For both first-years and seniors, the results demonstrate that students perceive others to be posting and viewing social media more frequently than themselves, and this effect is even more pronounced for males. There was also a main effect for sex, such that females perceived both themselves and other students to be posting and viewing social media more frequently than males. These findings add nuance to the social media usage of college students, a topic that is continuously expanding as technology changes. These findings can help guide faculty, advisors, and administrators to better understand how students’ perceptions of peers’ social media usage might relate to their own, and consider how those perceptions of their classmates might affect their own behavior in both positive and negative ways.