Less in-person social interaction with peers among U.S. adolescents in the 21st century and links to loneliness
By Jean M. Twenge, Brian H. Spitzberg, W. Keith Campbell. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 2019
462 citations recorded by the source corpus.
In nationally representative samples of U.S. adolescents (age: 13–18) and entering college students, 1976–2017 (N = 8.2 million), iGen adolescents in the 2010s (vs. previous generations) spent less time on in-person (face-to-face) social interaction with peers, including getting together or socializing with friends, going to parties, going out, dating, going to movies, and riding in cars for fun. College-bound high school seniors in 2016 (vs. the late 1980s) spent an hour less a day engaging in in-person social interaction, despite declines in paid work and little change in homework or extracurricular activity time. The results suggest that time displacement occurs at the cohort level, with in-person social interaction declining as digital media use increased, but not at the individual level, where in-person social interaction and social media use are positively correlated. Adolescents’ feelings of loneliness increased sharply after 2011. Adolescents low in in-person social interaction and high in social media use reported the most loneliness.
Subfields: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Literature and Literary Theory, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b3d9420fbe3ca036bcdf81a636782f5a431890df
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Citations in the corpus
- Fear of missing out (FoMO): A generational phenomenon or an individual difference? (2020, background): “Similar to proposed cohort differences in FoMO, a separate line of research is suggestive of increased loneliness in the most recent cohort of young adults (Pittman & Reich, 2016; Twenge et al., 2019), yet the role of online exposure and relationships with increasing or decreasing loneliness is comp”