To our knowledge, four recent studies have investigated within-person associations of social media use with different indicators of adolescent well-being (i.e., life satisfaction, depression), again with mixed results 6, 11, 12, 13. The current study aims to respond to this call by investigating associations between social media use and well-being within single adolescents across multiple points in time 8, 9, 10. While such between-person studies are valuable in their own right, several scholars 6, 7 have recently called for studies that investigate within-person associations to understand whether an increase in an adolescent’s social media use is associated with an increase or decrease in that adolescent’s well-being. Most of these studies have focused on between-person associations, examining whether adolescents who use social media more (or less) often than their peers experience lower (or higher) levels of well-being than these peers.

These studies have typically reported mixed findings, yielding either small negative, small positive, or no effects of the time spent using social media on different indicators of well-being, such as life satisfaction and depressive symptoms (for recent reviews, see for example 1, 2, 3, 4, 5). Ever since the introduction of social media, such as Facebook and Instagram, researchers have been studying whether the use of such media may affect adolescents’ well-being.

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