Main content
Publications /
Social Media Habits and Procrastination
Date created: | Last Updated:
: DOI | ARK
Creating DOI. Please wait...
Category: Uncategorized
Description: There is popular concern that adolescents’ social media use, especially via smartphones, leads to the delay of intended, potentially more important tasks. Automatic social media use and frequent phone checking may especially contribute to task delay. Prior research has investigated this hypothesis through between-person associations. We advance the literature by additionally examining within-person and person-specific associations of automatic social media use and mobile phone checking frequency with each other and task delay. Preregistered hypotheses were tested with multilevel modeling on data from three weeks of experience sampling among N = 312 adolescents (ages 13 to 15), including T = 22,809 assessments. More automatic social media use and more frequent phone checking were, on average, associated with more task delay at within-person level. However, heterogeneity analyses found these positive associations to be significant for only a minority of adolescents. We discuss implications for the media habit concept and adolescents’ self-regulation.