Teens in Social Media: Data-driven Comparative Analysis on Behaviors in Instagram

Social media plays an important role in connecting people and making them interact with each other. Its influence is more direct and stronger to teens, because they are more active and engaged in using social media than other generations. Much research has presented teens’ high use and engagement as well as characteristics in social media; however, the way of analyzing them has mostly relied on ethnographic accounts or quantitative analyses with small datasets. In this thesis, I present the analysis of how teens use social media differently using a large dataset of Instagram. First, I present the characteristics of Instagram use by people with respect to structure, influence, and context, in order to see its general use patterns. Second, based on the methods used in the first study, I present how teens use and engage in Instagram. I describe a novel method to detect teens and adults using user profiles, mixing with textual and facial recognition approaches. With around 27,000 teens and adults identified, I present the comparative study of the two user groups. The study results highlight that (1) teens tend to post fewer but remove more photos, influenced by the number of Likes; (2) teens tend to be more engaged in Liking and commenting and to express their emotions and social interests, than adults; (3) teens tend to have less diverse photo content. Lastly, I will discuss theoretical and practical interpretations and implications of the results, as well as future directions of my research. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES .................................................................................................................. v LIST OF TABLES ................................................................................................................... vii Chapter