Social media use, drinking, and smoking: Within-person relations from adolescence to adulthood

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Adolescents and young adults spend several hours a day on social media, and many are exposed to substance-related content. Exposure to substance-related content may normalize substance use and provide opportunities for social learning and reinforcement and thereby increase the risk of substance use. Although previous longitudinal studies have found greater social media use to predict future substance use, they are based on self-reports, risking common-rater bias, and their results do not inform about within-person prospective effects which are important for etiological inference. In this study, at ages 16, 18, and 20, a sample from two Norwegian birth cohorts ( n = 884, 54.30% girls) was assessed. Their weekly social media use was captured using data from the participants’ smartphones (i.e., the screen time application), whereas questionnaires were used to measure substance use (i.e., frequency of getting drunk, using marijuana/hashish, smoking cigarettes). Results of the Random Intercept Cross-Lagged Panel Models (RI-CLPMs) showed that changes in social media screen time did not predict future changes in the frequency of getting drunk or smoking cigarettes. The model involving use of marijuana/hashish could not be estimated. The findings do not provide evidence that reducing social media screen time would reduce the frequency of getting drunk or smoking cigarettes.