An Analysis of Social Media Use Among College Students: Examining Social Comparison, Perceived Levels of Social Support, and Loneliness

The current study explored college students' use of social media and its relationship to their perceived levels of social support, how often they engage in social comparison, and their feelings of loneliness. Research from Chua and Chang (2016) indicates that social comparison occurs when individuals want to impress others, and convert their peers on social media into comparison targets. With rising levels of social media usage (Lau, 2017), itis important to explore and understand how these platforms impact individuals, especially college students. Hawley et al. (2016) found that in a sample of college students, faculty and staff, the students trended toward lower scores than other participants on mental health measures. Complicating this, Richardson et al. (2017) found that mental health symptoms may be exacerbated by high levels of loneliness. In order to investigate how these factors relate to social media use, a platform meant for people to connect and find support, an anonymous online survey was distributed to students at a small liberal arts college in New York. The sample consisted of 42 females and 9 males, with an average age of 20.38 years old. As hypothesized, the results indicated that students who used social media more frequently were more likely than other students to engage in social comparison and students who perceived themselves to have lower levels of social support were more likely than other students to report higher loneliness scores. However, the hypothesis that students who used social media more would be lonelier was not supported, and there was no significant relationship between social media use and social support. A regression analysis indicated that perceived social support scores accounted for a significant amount of variance in loneliness scores. These results suggest that social comparison occurs when using social media, and perceptions of social support are related to how lonely individuals feel. These findings stress the importance of understanding what drives students to use social media, and how online social networks may impact their social lives and overall well-being. If students are not receiving social support from social networks, future research should investigate what other advantages or disadvantages individuals may derive from social media use.