Be Yourself: The Relative Importance of Personal and Social Norms for Adolescents’ Self-Presentation on Instagram

Zillich, Arne Freya und Riesmeyer, Claudia : Be Yourself: The Relative Importance of Personal and Social Norms for Adolescents’ Self-Presentation on Instagram. In: Social Media & Society, Vol. 7, No. 3

Abstract

This article examines the relative importance of personal, descriptive, and injunctive norms for adolescents’ self-presentation on Instagram and analyzes the role of proximal and distal reference groups in norm negotiation. Based on 27 semi-structured interviews with German Instagram users between 14 and 19 years old, we identified four types of adolescents’ self-presentation that differ in terms of norms and referent others: authentic, self-confident, self-staged, and audience-oriented self-presentation. In addition, our study demonstrates that adolescents engage in reflective norm breaches when coping with conflicting self-presentation norms. These results highlight the crucial role of both adolescents themselves and their proximal and distal reference groups for norm negotiation.

• Item Type: Journal article
• Faculties: Social Sciences > Department of Communications and Media (IfKW)
• Subjects: 300 Social sciences > 300 Social sciences, sociology and anthropology; 300 Social sciences > 370 Education
• ISSN: 2056-3051
• Annotation: First published online July 26, 2021
• Language: English