Peer-Reported Social Adjustment and Social Media Use Patterns among Adolescents: A Latent Profile Analysis

This study examined the association between adolescents’ social adjustment and their social media use (SMU) patterns. Participants were 716 Dutch adolescents (Mage = 13.2 years, 48.3% girls). Latent profile analysis of self-reported time spent on SMU, intensity of online peer communication, and problematic SMU yielded four distinct patterns: problematic heavy use (n = 129), non-problematic heavy use (n = 262), moderate use (n = 197), and low use (n = 128). Adolescents' peer-reported social status and behaviors were associated with the SMU patterns. Withdrawn or more prosocial adolescents were less likely to engage in SMU overall. Popular or proactive aggressive adolescents were likely to show non-problematic heavy SMU, while disliked, reactively aggressive, or less pro-social adolescents showed some risk for problematic SMU. The findings suggest a distinction be-tween heavy and problematic SMU and that adolescents’ risk for problematic SMU varied between subtypes of social status and behaviors.