Congratulations to Caroline Washington who on Tuesday, August 20, 2024, successfully defended her dissertation proposal. The title of Caroline’s dissertation is: SOCIAL MEDIA AND ADOLESCENCE: A QUALITATIVE STUDY OF PEER GROUP DYNAMICS FROM HIGH SCHOOL TO COLLEGE.
Caroline has proposed a qualitative study of students’ use of social media in high school and college and the role it has on their interpersonal relationships and sense of self. Drawing upon Leon Festinger’s Social Comparison Theory (SCT), this study further seeks to understand what participants’ comparison groups are in high school and college. Caroline will recruit college students to participate in interviews about their use of social media in high school and in college, and how they describe the ways their comparison groups in high school and college might have changed. Caroline's research is incredibly timely and important: social media use seems ubiquitous; schools are grappling with whether cell phones should be permitted at all; and the U.S. Surgeon General issued an advisory in 2023 highlighting the risks teens face related to social media, including social comparison.
Dissertation Committee Chair:
Dr. Susan V. Iverson
Dissertation Committee Members:
Dr. Robert Feirsen
Dr. Elizabeth Keren-Kolb
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