Career Future Time Perspectives, Social Media Engagement, and the School-to-Work Transition in Emerging Adulthood

This study investigates the relationship between general and problematic social media use, and young adults’ future time perspectives during their school-to-work-transition. It also explores how parents perceive the influence of their children’s media use on career perspectives. Utilizing longitudinal data from a quantitative study, 443 parent–youth dyads at t1 and 355 at t2 were surveyed on their practices concerning daily social media use, problematic social media engagement, transition and moratorium orientations, and parental assessments. Open-ended responses from parents indicated that the majority perceived either a positive effect or no influence of media use on career opportunities, while a smaller proportion reported negative impacts. Adolescents whose parents expressed positive views demonstrated significantly stronger transition orientations. Cross-sectional analyses demonstrated that problematic social media use was negatively associated with transition orientation and positively related to moratorium orientation. General usage time, however, showed no meaningful associations. Longitudinal regression analyses indicated that neither general nor problematic social media use predicted subsequent levels of transition or moratorium orientation after controlling for baseline orientations, pointing to substantial stability in these dispositions. The findings suggest that problematic social media engagement coincides with less future-oriented mindsets, while future orientations remain stable over time.