Social media use, while not even two decades old, continues to shape the way individuals throughout the world communicate and express themselves. This paradigm shift in human behavior has altered many aspects of society’s established interaction norms. Instagram remains one of the most popular social media platforms, and young adults make up the largest proportion of its users. Various forms of behavior can be portrayed on the image-oriented application, included those related to alcohol use. Researchers have hypothesized that differences may exist between perceived and actual alcohol use behaviors when utilizing Instagram content as a predictive factor. This study examines potential discrepancies between Instagram-based self-reported and actual alcohol-related communication in a population of Belgian college students.
The study’s sample consists of 149 young-adult college students from universities in Belgium who volunteered to share their Instagram profiles for qualitative analysis in addition to completing questionnaires regarding their Instagram activity. Participants shared their Instagram handle with the research team, and two members of the team analyzed the alcohol- related content (pictures, video, text, etc.) present in each participant’s profile from 4/1/2019 to 3/31/2020. The questionnaires recorded the following self-report data: demographics, past year frequency of sharing alcohol-related images and videos, injunctive norms of alcohol-related content sharing, and motives for sharing alcohol-related content. The data was analyzed using confirmatory factor analysis, bootstrapped correlations, and linear regression modelling.
Results of the analysis found roughly three-quarters of all participants shared alcohol-related content on their profiles during the review year (73.2%), and less than 5% of participants perceived alcohol-related posts as being disapproved of by their followers/friends (4.6%). “Entertainment” was the most cited motive for sharing alcohol-related content, with 48.1% of participants endorsing it. 32.7% of participants were able to recall, with relative accuracy, the number of alcohol-related posts they shared on their profile, while 60.6% overestimated the number of respective posts. Overestimation frequency was found to be associated with increased injunctive norms concerning alcohol-related posting.
Takeaway: college students may overestimate the amount of alcohol-related content they have shared over the past year on their Instagram profile, especially if they perceive their friends to be approving of such content.