Developing and Testing Self-Report Scales for Short Video: Cognitive Interviews and Experimental Survey Work to Assess Multi-Dimensional Platform Use

Short video platforms (e.g., TikTok and Instagram Reels) are quickly rising in popularity and usage, yet collecting data on time on social media through surveys can be difficult. This study combines cognitive interviews, data donations, and a survey experiment to propose and test a novel measure of time spent on short video platforms that assesses frequency and duration separately. Cognitive interviews confirm the validity of the approach and ensure respondent understanding of the novel measure. Experimental results in which the measure is compared both to data donations and existing self-report measures show that it not only performs equally well at capturing overall time spent as existing measures, but also yields new insights about how users interact with these platforms. In particular, users spend substantially more time per sitting on short video platforms as compared to other forms of social media. These results demonstrate the importance of treating short video platforms differently from more text-centered forms of social media (e.g., main Facebook feed or X).