52 3-item scale used the same 1 (disagree strongly) to 7 (agree strongly) scale described above. This questionnaire asked participants to rate statements such as “maintaining close relationships has been difficult and frustrating for me” and “people would describe me as a giving person, willing to share my time with others,” (M = 5.10, SD = 1.12; see Table 1). Other factors. We also collected data about age and gender, though they did not significantly alter our results.
Table 1. Descriptive statistics for social media use, quality of alternatives, relationship closeness, age, and well-being.
Data analytic procedure. We used a multilevel modeling procedure allowing social media use and quality of attractive alternatives to vary by dyad to account for the dependence within the data (participants nested within couples). We conducted a series of multilevel regressions with the statistical program R to examine the interaction between social media use and quality of alternatives predicting relationship closeness. We then conducted follow-up simple slopes analyses to understand the nature of the interaction. Results Overall correlations. We first examined the bivariate correlations among each variable of interest. The correlation between relationship closeness and social media use was not significant, r = 0.05, .95CI[- 0.19, 0.29] (see Table 2). Relationship closeness and quality of alternatives were significantly negatively correlated, r = - 0.32, .95CI[- 0.52, - 0.09]. Social media use and quality of alternatives were not
S. Zhao significantly correlated, r = - 0.04, .95CI[- 0.30, 0.20].
Table 2. Pearson’s correlations and confidence intervals between social media use, quality of alternatives, and relationship closeness.
Interactions. Using a linear mixed model, we found a marginal interaction between social media use and quality of attractive alternatives predicting relationship closeness (b = -.09, z = -1.91, p = .06; see Table 3). At mean levels of social media use, quality of attractive alternatives had a significant negative association with relationship closeness (b = -.27, z = -2.742, p = .0061; see Table 3), in line with past work. However, at low levels of social media use, the association between quality of attractive alternatives and relationship closeness was non-significant (b = -.10, z = -0.77, p = .44). In other words, having a high quality of attractive alternatives did not significantly predict relationship closeness for those who did not use social media frequently. However, at high levels of social media use, there was a significant negative association between quality of attractive alternatives and relationship closeness (b = -.44, z = -3.170, p = .0015; see Figure 2), even stronger than that seen at mean levels of social media use. Therefore, having a higher quality of attractive alternatives was more strongly related to decreased relationship closeness for those who used social media frequently. All associations held after controlling for age, gender, and well-being. These results were consistent with the hypothesis of social media use as a moderating variable of the relationship between attractive alternatives and relationship closeness. Individual social media sites. We also assessed how the individual social media sites related to relationship closeness to examine if any site showed unique associations. We found a significant interaction between quality of alternatives and Instagram use predicting closeness (b = -.08, z = -2.42, p < .05). However, the interactions between quality of alternatives and Facebook Use