De relatie tussen sociale media gebruik en slap bij adolescenten, met FOMO als moderator.

Abstract

Social media use is more often getting mentioned as an important factor that could influence adolescents’ sleep. Sleep is important for brain development in adolescence, and the lack of sleep has proven to have negative consequences for adolescents. Since earlier scientific literature has shown inconsistent findings on the existence of a relationship between social media use and sleep in adolescents, this study focusses on adding knowledge to the relationship between social media use and sleep in adolescents and includes ‘the fear of missing out’ as a moderator. Based on the existent literature, a negative relationship between social media use and sleep is expected, which can be positively moderated by FOMO. 404 adolescents (mean age was 13.5 years old) and their parents participated in this study. The hypotheses were tested using a regression analysis and a moderation analysis in SPSS-statistics. The results have shown that there was a significant negative relationship between social media use and sleep. Higher levels of social media use were related to lower levels of average sleep per night in adolescents. However, the effect was very small and disappeared when FOMO was added to the model. Furthermore, FOMO did not significantly moderate the relationship between social media use and sleep. Additional research is necessary to determine what other factors possibly contribute to adolescents’ sleeping patterns, since the influence of social media use on sleep wasn’t found to be very robust.