Social media literacy & adolescent social online behavior in Germany

The present study addresses the increased merging of adolescents’ online and social practices and provides a broad and developmental conceptualization, operationalization, and empirical investigation of social media literacy as a central resource in their everyday lives. Using a newly developed standardized instrument, the study investigated how different components of adolescents’ social media literacy (knowledge, abilities, and motivation) and aspects of their immediate social contexts (family and peers) influence their level of socially competent online behavior. In an initial empirical study, a large sample of 1,508 secondary school students in Germany (ø 14 years, 66% females) was surveyed in a classic paper-and-pencil setting. The findings confirmed that adolescents’ knowledge, abilities, and motivation positively predicted a higher level of participatory-moral, communicative, and educational behavior, with behavioral motivation playing the most influential role. Moreover, perceived parental mediation and peer communication pressure significantly influenced adolescents’ social behavior online, showing different effects for participatory-moral behavior versus communicative-integrative behavior with friends. The findings reveal that it may be challenging for young users to reconcile different social requirements online. Implications for a preventive promotion of media literacy are discussed.