A Qualitative Study Exploring Behaviors Which Underpin Different Types of Social Media Use

Despite the popularity of social media, we have little understanding of how “social” these platforms actually are. “Social media use” is often considered in generic terms or dichotomized into active or passive use. However, this does not explain the specific behaviors users engage in. We explored this with respect to different social media platforms, namely Instagram and Facebook. The overall sample of nine participants included four males and five females between the ages of 18 and 36. Participants took part in semistructured interviews to describe their behaviors when using either Instagram (n = 4) or Facebook (n = 5). From reflexive thematic analysis, the first theme was “Determinants of using social media,” with two subthemes. This main theme describes factors that generally motivate people to use the respective social media platform. However, the second theme was “Determinants of behaviors,” with seven subthemes, which relate more specifically to particular actions or behaviors that specific platforms afford users to be able to do. There were clear distinctions between what might constitute social media “use” (first theme) and social media “behaviors” (second theme). Our findings suggest that concepts of “active” and “passive” use are not sufficient to capture the complexities of underpinning behaviors or sensitive to the within-person and between-context variations that explain behaviors underpinning social media use.