What Is My Research?

My dissertation research is organized around the concept of Social Media-Induced Self-Fragmentation (SMSF): the process by which sustained engagement with contemporary social media platforms erodes users’ sense of a coherent, unified self. While identity has always been contextually negotiated, the affordances specific to today’s major platforms create conditions for a qualitatively different kind of fragmentation: one that is structurally embedded, algorithmically amplified, and experienced simultaneously across multiple audiences, roles, and performance contexts with little opportunity for integration or repair.

Three platform affordances lie at the core of my theoretical model. First, algorithmic curation continuously optimizes which version of a user’s self-presentation receives the most engagement, rewarding emotional volatility, novelty, and controversy over consistency and depth, pulling users toward self-performances that are maximally engaging rather than genuinely authentic. Second, quantified feedback mechanisms (likes, shares, follower counts, view metrics) translate self-worth into numerical data visible to oneself and to others, encouraging a mode of self-evaluation that is both externalized and fundamentally unstable. Third, context collapse, the phenomenon whereby multiple, normally separated audiences (family, coworkers, strangers, fans) are compressed into a single undifferentiated public, destroys the contextual integrity on which coherent self-presentation normally depends (Marwick & boyd, 2011). The result is a user who must simultaneously manage incompatible versions of themselves without the social scaffolding that ordinary, offline identity work provides.

To make sense of these dynamics, I draw on Heinz Kohut’s self-psychology as my primary theoretical lens. Kohut (1971, 1977) described the self not as a static entity but as a dynamic process requiring ongoing relational sustenance (what he termed selfobject experiences) to maintain cohesion, vitality, and continuity. When those relational structures are disrupted or unreliable, the self becomes fragmented, anxious, and vulnerable to narcissistic injury. I argue that social media platforms structurally replicate many of the conditions Kohut associated with selfobject failure: they provide mirroring that is algorithmically variable rather than genuinely empathic, they surface idealized others through infinite-scroll comparison feeds, and they dissolve the relational contexts that normally ground identity coherence.

Sherry Turkle’s (2011) work on digital identity provides an important complement to the Kohutian framework. Turkle documented how the “always-on” quality of networked life pulls users toward a kind of self that is perpetually performed for external audiences, never fully integrated, and increasingly alienated from its own inner life. Together, Kohut’s structural account of self-cohesion and Turkle’s phenomenological account of networked selfhood provide the theoretical foundation for my SMSF construct.

The populations I focus on are social media influencers and content creators, as well as adolescents and young adults more broadly. Methodologically, my project contributes in two related ways. I am developing and validating a new psychometric instrument, the SMSF Measure (SMSFM), designed to capture the specific cognitive, affective, and behavioral dimensions of social media-induced identity fragmentation. This work involves item generation from theoretical analysis, expert review, exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis, and tests of convergent, discriminant, and incremental validity. Once the instrument is validated, I will use SEM to test theoretically derived pathways from platform-specific affordance exposure to fragmentation and downstream well-being outcomes (Valkenburg et al., 2022).

Why Is It Important?

The urgency of my research is based on a public health reality that has become impossible to ignore. Over the past decade, rates of depression, anxiety, and loneliness among adolescents and young adults in the United States have increased sharply, with the steepest rises occurring precisely during the period of widespread smartphone and social media adoption. Twenge (2017), drawing on nationally representative survey data collected from over eleven million young people, documented that teens born after 1995, the first generation to spend their entire adolescence with social media, experienced unprecedented declines in psychological well-being, with rates of depression and suicide ideation rising most sharply among girls and young women.

Primack et al. (2017) found in a nationally representative study of U.S. young adults that use of multiple social media platforms was independently associated with significantly elevated odds of depression and anxiety symptoms. Importantly, this study found a dose-response relationship: those using seven to eleven platforms had more than three times the odds of depression and anxiety compared to those using two or fewer, am indication that the fragmented, multi-platform quality of contemporary social media engagement is a meaningful risk factor. This finding aligns directly with my theoretical model of SMSF, which proposes that it is precisely the multi-platform, multi-audience, algorithmically fragmented character of modern social media that undermines self-cohesion.

Hancock et al. (2020) synthesized the broader literature in a meta-analysis covering over 200 studies and found small but reliable associations between social media use and both depression and anxiety, while also identifying significant positive associations with social well-being, laying specific emphasis on the point that social media effects are not uniformly negative but are contingent on how, by whom, and in what contexts platforms are used. Most recently, the American Psychological Association (2023) issued a health advisory on adolescent social media use, calling for platform design changes to reduce features like engagement metrics, endless scrolling, and algorithmically amplified content, that pose the greatest psychological risks.

Despite this growing body of evidence, a critical gap persists: there is no validated psychometric instrument specifically designed to measure identity fragmentation as a mechanism linking social media use to psychological distress. This measurement gap matters because without a validated instrument, researchers cannot rigorously test the mediating role of identity fragmentation in social media effects models, cannot identify which users are most at risk, and cannot evaluate whether clinical or educational interventions successfully reduce it. My research sits at the intersection of platform design research and psychological well-being research, with direct practical implications for informing evidence-based platform design standards, providing practitioners with validated screening tools, and supporting media literacy curricula.

References

American Psychological Association. (2023, May). Health advisory on social media use in adolescence.

Arnd-Caddigan, M. (2015). Sherry Turkle: Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other: Basic Books, New York, 2011, 348 pp, ISBN 978-0465031467 (pbk).

Kohut, H. (1971). The analysis of the self. University of Chicago Press.

Press, U., & Kohut, H. (1977). The restoration of the self. New York: International.

Marwick, A. E., & Boyd, D. (2011). I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience. New media & society, 13(1), 114-133.

Liu, S. X., & Hancock, J. (2025). Stanford Social Media Lab: Pioneering Research on Media. In Creating Communication and Media Research Labs: A Blueprint for Success (pp. 113-118). Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland.

Livingstone, S. (2018). iGen: why today’s super-connected kids are growing up less rebellious, more tolerant, less happy–and completely unprepared for adulthood.

Nichols, G. (2018). iGen: why today’s super-connected kids are growing up less rebellious, more tolerant, less happy–and completely unprepared for adulthood–and what that means for the rest of us.

Primack, B. A., Shensa, A., Escobar-Viera, C. G., Barrett, E. L., Sidani, J. E., Colditz, J. B., & James, A. E. (2017). Use of multiple social media platforms and symptoms of depression and anxiety: A nationally-representative study among US young adults. Computers in human behavior, 69, 1-9.

Valkenburg, P. M., Meier, A., & Beyens, I. (2022). Social media use and its impact on adolescent mental health: An umbrella review of the evidence. Current opinion in psychology, 44, 58-68.

Wolfe, B. (1989). Heinz Kohut’s self psychology: A conceptual analysis. Psychotherapy: Theory, Research, Practice, Training, 26(4), 545.