Social support and friendship quality across contexts: Exploring digital versus in-person relationships of emerging adults

The social lives of college students have expanded over the 21st century to include online spaces. Little is known about the importance of social relationships occurring online versus offline (i.e., in face-to-face situations). Prior research shows social support as generally strongly related to well-being. Social support is also found to be a motivator to use social media to connect with others. Intersecting social media use, well-being, and friendship quality provides insight into modern connections. In the present research, we hypothesized offline friendship quality will be more strongly related to wellbeing measures than online (i.e., connections through technology) friendship quality. We also hypothesized that men and women would differ in amount of offline and online social support and overall well-being. Men and women are also anticipated to differ in how social media use. Finally, we hypothesized participants to report more offline than online social interaction. Using Qualtrics to compile online questionnaires, we assessed online and offline social support, wellbeing (i.e., life satisfaction, loneliness, and perceived stress), and time spent interacting online and offline within the last two weeks. Using the Department of Psychology SONA systems, we recruited 237 participants (93 men, 149 women, 2 other). Results indicated partial support for the hypotheses. Social media usage was supported as a significant predictor for perceived stress, but not for loneliness and life satisfaction. Social support of a particular online friend was not related to well-being, but social support from a particular offline friend was. Unexpectedly, there were fewer gender differences than hypothesized. Usage of social media platforms showed the most variation between men and women. Women reported higher levels of stress than men. Lastly, we confirmed the hypothesis that women and men spend more time in offline than online social interactions.