Investigation of the social identity development and self presentations of adolescents through their instagram usages

This study was carried out in order to reveal whether there is a relationship between the psychosocial development levels of adolescents and their self-presentations on Instagram, and to determine whether self-presentations differ according to their Instagram usage goals and attitudes. For this purpose, in the 2019-2020 academic year, 525 students between the ages of 15 and 18 who attend 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th grades of high schools were given a Demographic Information Form, Instagram Usage Questionnaire, The Modified Self-Presentation Tactics Scale and Erikson's Psychosocial Development Stages Questionnaire has been applied. SPSS 23.0 statistics package program was used to evaluate the data. The demographic information of the participants and the information about their use of Instagram are given in descriptive tables. Pearson's correlation analysis was used to examine the relationship between research variables. In addition, when examining whether self-presentation tactics, one of the research variables, differ in terms of Instagram usage and demographic variables, independent samples t-test and one-way ANOVA were performed. In order to determine which groups caused the difference, Scheffe post-hoc test was used. As a result of the research, most of the adolescents have been using Instagram for 3-4 years; uses Instagram for 1-3 hours a day; they share the photos of their friends with their own photo most on Instagram; they mostly use emojis or symbols under their posts on Instagram; it has been determined that they open accounts in social networks between the ages of 11-12. In addition, as the psychosocial development levels of adolescents increase, the behavior of self-presentation through Instagram also increases. It is also seen that adolescents with high identity acquisition have high self-presentation behaviors. It was concluded that female participants used all other tactics, except for the "exemplification" self-presentation tactic, more than men. According to another result, it was observed that adolescents attending 11th and 12th grades displayed more self-presentation behaviors than those attending 9th and 10th grades. It has been observed that adolescents in the age group of 17 exhibit more self-presentation behaviors than those in the 15 and 16 age groups. There is no difference in self-presentations according to the state or private school attendance of adolescents. It has been observed that adolescents who use Instagram for less than 1 hour and for 1-3 hours exhibit more self-presentation behavior than those who use Instagram for 5 hours or more.