Social Media and Transition into Adulthood: A Life-Course Approach

Giorgio Nocerino , Centre d'estudis demografics / UAB
Pablo Gracia, Autonomous University of Barcelona, Centre for Demographic Studies (CED)

The digital revolution has reshaped how young people navigate privacy, intimacy, and identity, profoundly transforming critical life-course events. While demographic studies have examined how internet access affects family formation (Billari et al., 2019; Sironi & Kashyap, 2022), little is known about how social media exposure influences the timing and sequencing of key transitions to adulthood. This study develops an integrated life-course framework to examine how social media use relates to the completion of tertiary education, entry into work, leaving the parental home, cohabitation, and parenthood. Using eleven waves (2014–2024) of the Longitudinal Internet Studies for the Social Sciences (LISS), a nationally representative Dutch panel, we link data on platform-specific measures of social media use (e.g. Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube) to life-course transitions. Results indicate that LinkedIn use is positively associated with earlier completion of education and job entry, while Instagram and Facebook correlate with transitions to independent living, suggesting distinct social mechanisms across platforms. Kaplan–Meier estimates further show that users complete tertiary education and enter employment earlier than non-users, while differences are small or non-significant for cohabitation, independent living, and parenthood. A pooled Latent Class Analysis identifies four user profiles—Social Networkers, Light Users, Career Users, and Moderate Users—whose transition timings vary in line with their intensity and purpose of use. Overall, preliminary findings highlight that social media exposure is associated with accelerated educational and work trajectories but not with earlier family formation, illustrating how social media may selectively reshape pathways into adulthood in contemporary societies.

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 Presented in Session 106. Flash Session Becoming an Adult in the 21st Century