Maartje Boer

THE COMPLEX ASSOCIATION BETWEEN SMU AND WELLBEING 237 8 The Association Between SMU Intensity and Wellbeing Depends On Whether SMU Problems Are Considered Adolescents’ SMU intensity refers to the frequency or time spent on SMU activities, while SMU problems are characterized by symptoms of addiction to social media, for example, loss of control over SMU (Griffiths et al., 2014). SMU intensity is correlated with SMU problems with a small to moderate effect size (Frost & Rickwood, 2017; Parry et al., 2020). Longitudinal research using the same data as the present study shows that although many adolescents with SMU problems report high SMU intensity, most adolescents show high SMU intensity without any SMU problems and that some adolescents who report SMU problems do not show high SMU intensity (Boer, Stevens, Finkenauer, & VandenEijnden, 2021). Rather thanhigher levels of SMU intensity, higher levels of SMU problems may be detrimental to adolescents’ wellbeing (Primack et al., 2017; Van den Eijnden et al., 2018). Adolescents engaging in high SMU intensity may be well able to regulate their SMU and to combine it with a healthy lifestyle. In contrast, when adolescents experience SMU problems, which means that SMU dominates their everyday life and impairs control over thoughts and behaviors, this may threaten their wellbeing. Given that SMU intensity and SMU problems are correlated, but could have differential associations with wellbeing, observed negative associations between SMU intensity and wellbeing may be driven by SMU problems. Notwithstanding the previous reasoning, few studies included both indicators of SMU in their analyses. Previous longitudinal research using data from the present study showed that, when controlled for SMU problems, adolescents’ overall SMU intensity did not predict changes in life satisfaction and depressive symptoms over time. Furthermore, SMU problems predicted decreases in life satisfaction and increases in depressive symptoms (Boer, Stevens, Finkenauer, De Looze, et al., 2021; Van den Eijnden et al., 2018). Also, in a cross-sectional study among adolescents from 29 countries, intensive communication on social media was not associated with life satisfaction, whereas problematic SMU was negatively associated with life satisfaction (Boer, Van den Eijnden, et al., 2020). A limitation of these studies is that they did not compare the association between SMU intensity and wellbeing with and without controlling for SMU problems. Hence, it remained unclear whether the association between SMU intensity and indicators of wellbeing was