{"doi":"10.31219/osf.io/bmhv6","title":"Capturing the Bigger Picture: A Gestalt of General and Alcohol-Specific Social Media Usage During the Transition to College as a Predictor of First-Year Alcohol Use and Consequences","abstract":"Previous research has shown a reliable association between social media (SM) use and drinking among college students. However, most studies have investigated SM behaviors (e.g., time spent on a platform, posting frequency) in isolation and on a single site. While some have studied multiple SM behaviors across platforms using person-centered approaches (e.g., latent profile analysis [LPA]), these studies have failed to take alcohol-related SM behaviors into account. This longitudinal study addressed this gap in the literature by using LPA to identify subpopulations of SM users during the college transition (N = 319; 62.1% female) using general (frequency of checking, time spent on, and frequency of posting to Instagram/Facebook/Snapchat; Finstagram ownership) and alcohol-related SM behaviors (posting alcohol, partying, and marijuana content). LPA results revealed three SM user profiles at baseline: low general use with low alcohol-related posting (LGU+LAP), high general use with low alcohol-related posting (HGU+LAP), and high general use with high alcohol-related posting (HGU+HAP). Prospective analyses revealed that HGU+HAP membership was associated with greater descriptive peer drinking norms, alcohol use, and consequences relative to HGU+LAP and LGU+LAP membership. Results suggest that there are distinct patterns of general and alcohol-related SM use during the college transition associated with risky drinking that can inform interventions combating SM-related alcohol risks. These findings illustrate the importance of investigating SM use holistically and suggests studying alcohol-related SM behaviors may reveal differences in individuals’ alcohol risk that general SM behaviors might not capture.","journal":"OSF Preprints (OSF Preprints)","year":2022,"id":302513,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":1,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9595,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2022-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":994479,"name":"Reed M. Morgan","orcid":"0000-0003-0302-1766","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":578314,"name":"Sarah C. Boyle","orcid":"0000-0001-5888-3967","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":382852,"name":"Francisco Alejandro Montiel Ishino","orcid":"0000-0002-2837-726X","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":578315,"name":"Joseph W. LaBrie","orcid":"0000-0002-3485-3787","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":871386,"name":"Bradley M. Trager","orcid":"0000-0002-8832-4442","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":50,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T00:32:16.279991Z","pmid":null,"pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}