Self-presentation On Social Networking Sites And Friendship Among Adolescents

With the development and popularity of computer and smartphones in adolescents,they use social networking sites (SNSs) to interact with their friends more often. The 39th China Statistical Report on Internet Development published by China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) indicated that adolescence aged fom 10 to 19 is a dominant user group of SNSs. SNSs play an increasing vital role in social interaction between adolescents and their friends as well as establishing and maintaining friendships.As for adolescence, they spend more time in connecting and playing with peers and friends who play an important role in their social development. Hence, maintaining and developing good friendship is a main developmental task for adolescents in this period. One of the most popular reason in using SNSs which provide them a convenient interactive platform is to keep connection and interact with their family and friends.Thus,the social effect of using SNSs on adolescents’ psychological adaption and social relationship development has aroused the attention of researchers. Recently, researchers focused on some specific behaviors on SNS (such as self-presentation on SNSs) rather than general SNSs use, and discussed the relationship between specific behaviors on SNS and friendship development which is more detailed and has more meaningful values. SNSs provide adolescents an opportunity to express and present information and emotions of themselves, and they would choose various strategies, honest self-presentation and positive self-presentation, to present different aspects of self. Different ways of self-presentation may exert different effect on adolescents’ friendship development, and positive feedback from friends on SNSs may also has influence on their friendship.Based on theories related to SNSs use and interpersonal relationships and combined with current situation of self-presentation and positive feedback on SNSs, we use longitudinal design and collected data at 2 time points (there is a one-year lag between time 1 and time 2) to examine the relationship between adolescents’ honest and positive self-presentation on SNSs and their friendship quality, furthermore, we also test the mechanism of the relationship, specifically, test the mediation role of positive feedback and the moderating role of social anxiety.In this research, we investigated 624 middle school students in Wuhan,measuring their honest and positive self-presentation, perception of positive feedback,social anxiety and friendship quality. We use SPSS 21.0 and Process by Hayes(2012)to analysis data. Cross-sectional analysis in this research showed that adolescents’honest and positive presentation on SNSs had significant positive correlation. Positive feedback plays a fully mediating role in the relationship between honest self-presentation and friendship quality while a partially mediating role between positive self-presentation and friendship quality. In longitudinal study, self-presentation was relatively stable. Honest self-presentation in time 1 positively predicted friendship quality in time 2, moreover, there was a causal link between two factors (honest self-presentation is the cause and friendship quality is the result). However, positive self-presentation couldn’t directly predict the friendship. In other words, the association between honest self-presentation and friendship quality is evident over time. We further find that positive feedback at time 1 has a fully mediating role between honest self-presentation at time 1 and friendship quality at time 2. The mediation model was not moderated by social anxiety.At last, we concluded the theoretical and practical meaning of our research while summarized shorts of our research. Some research assumptions and improvements were also pointed out at the end of our research.