Het mediërende effect van positieve peer feedback op de relatie tussen het sociale mediagebruik van adolescenten en hun zelfvertrouwen.

Abstract

Self-esteem is an important indicator of the well-being of a person. Self-esteem of adolescents is founded through the interactions with peers. Nowadays there is a lot of interaction that goes one online, through social media. This study investigates the relationship between the use of social media and self-esteem. It was expected that the more an adolescent makes use of social networking sites, the more self-esteem he or she has. Furthermore, this study tried to explain this relationship by saying that the more adolescents are using social media in their day-to-day life, the more positive peer feedback they are receiving and that this contributes to having more self-esteem. This means that receiving positive peer feedback mediates the relation. Data is retrieved from a database of the TNS-NIPO. Data had been collected through an questionnaire. For this study the self-report of 1032 adolescents has been used. The age of the adolescents range between ten and fifteen years old. The results showed us that a significant positive correlation between social media and self-esteem has been found. Furthermore, this study found that this correlation can be explained by the mediation effect of positive peer feedback.