Abstract
By linking self-reported psychosocial experiences to actual Snapchat interactions, the present study aims to provide a nuanced understanding of how social experiences are reflected in digital contexts. Specifically, the study investigates how adolescents’ experiences of friendship closeness, peer belongingness, loneliness, and social exclusion are related to adolescents’ online interactions with friends by combining real-time experience sampling methodology (ESM) with objective social media data from Snapchat. Participants were 123 adolescents (M age = 13.33 years; SD = 1.10; 58.50% girls). Adolescents with higher disconnectedness (i.e., greater loneliness and social inclusion) had more unanswered friendship requests and spent relatively more time on messaging. After controlling for multiple testing, social (dis)connectedness was not associated with the actual number of sent or viewed messages in the past two months, the number of friendships, Snapscore, or Snapchat AI usage. These findings do not provide clear evidence for either the social enhancement hypothesis or compensation hypothesis.