Understanding the association between loneliness and social media: a revised theoretical model

Abstract

While social media offers opportunities to increase social capital and to stay in contact with close ties, studies show social media use is associated positively and negatively with loneliness, indicating there is a dynamic relationship. To fully understand the association factors that influence the relationship need to be explored. This review updates an earlier proposed model incorporating recent research into influencing factors and identifies gaps in the evidence and methodological issues, suggesting focusses for future research. User characteristics and features of social media platforms influence the ways in which people use social media. Although there have been some important criticisms of the active-passive social media use dichotomy, there is strong support that passive social media use is associated with high loneliness, which may be due to this type of use being less likely to lead to interactions with others. Motivations for using social media, interactions and responses from others influence whether social gains are realised. Those with high social capital are most likely to experience the social gains from social media. The evidence in this area is still largely cross-sectional, so future research should use longitudinal and experimental designs to examine causality. Multi-level analyses will be important to identify between- and within-person effects. Future research will need to examine in more detail mediating and moderating factors, and as age/generational dependent effects are evident, particularly in studies examining user motivation, these should also be considered.