Social Media Engagement and Psychological Well-Being among Young Adults

Abstract

Social media is embedded in the everyday social environment of young adults, yet its psychological consequences cannot be adequately explained by screen time alone. This study proposes an engagement-sensitive framework that distinguishes purposeful social interaction from passive consumption, compulsive checking, and comparison-oriented browsing. The central research gap concerns the limited integration of behavioral engagement patterns, psychological mechanisms, and machine-learning-based risk estimation within a unified model of young-adult well-being.
The proposed research examines how qualitatively different patterns of social media engagement relate to positive affect, life satisfaction, loneliness, perceived social support, and psychological distress. A multimodal dataset combining questionnaire measures with privacy-preserving summaries of digital behavior is proposed for young adults aged 18–29 years. Explainable machine learning is incorporated to identify nonlinear combinations of engagement characteristics associated with lower or higher psychological well-being.