5. Discussion and Conclusion
5.2. The Relationship between Motives and Engagement
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brand-related online activities may be driven by economic incentives (e.g., money or rewards).
The novelty motive emerged as participants used Instagram Stories for its transiency: it disappears after 24 hours unless saved, followed by the perceived new and privacy gratifications. With the ephemeral nature and superiority in instant image-sharing and editing compartment (e.g., filters, drawings, emojis) (Ting, Ming, de Run,
& Choo, 2015; Wagner, 2018), users not only tend to present more authentically due to such fleeting feature (Facebook, 2018), but also acquire both intimacy and
immediacy of social presence, and perceived loneliness can thus decrease (Pittman &
Reich, 2016). Plus, new features constantly introduced by Instagram Stories enable users to express themselves freely in diverse creative ways (Instagram, 2019). Despite the traditional features of highlighting gratifications, the new and interactive features constantly introduced by Instagram Stories also facilitate social interaction.
The final motivation factor found in this research is surveillance, which is defined as keeping up with or get knowledge about others (i.e., family and friends).
Similar to Sheldon and Bryant’s (2016) findings, surveillance is one of the influential motivations for Instagram usage. Besides, it was found that 61% of U.S.
Instagrammers check Instagram Stories to see what their friends are doing now (Facebook, 2018). Likewise, the results indicated that participants used Instagram Stories to learn what others are doing. However, in this study, participants were found to use Instagram Stories to keep in touch and get updates on close ties, such as family and friends. While the surveillance motivation identified by Sheldon and Bryant (2016) is more likely to fulfill users’ gratifications of voyeurism and gossip, and be potentially related to envy that might lead to depression (Tandoc, Ferrucci, & Duffy, 2015), this study labels the surveillance motivation for Instagram Stories use as the information gained about others that can help maintain interpersonal relationships and fulfill the need to belong, and thus ameliorate loneliness (Alhabash & Ma, 2017).
5.2. The Relationship between Motives and Engagement
Instagram Stories users tend to engage with Instagram Stories in different ways: consuming, contributing, and creating. Previous research has revealed entertainment to be an overall motive for media consumption (Katz et al., 1974;
McQuail, 1983; Shao, 2009). Likewise, the findings of this research show that
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participants consumed Instagram Stories mainly for entertainment and perceived functionality. Similar to Bryant and Davies’ (2006) and Yang’s (2016) findings, this study confirms that through the selection for consumption of entertaining content on Instagram Stories, users could alter their mood and regulate their mood states as well as becoming less solitude by learning about others’ lives and what is happening, which may facilitate actual social interaction. Apart from that, a variety features of Instagram Stories such as filters were found to enhance users’ gratifications of Instagram Stories consumption. Content shared on Instagram Stories are mundane, spontaneous, and realistic in real time, offering both intimacy and immediacy of social presence, which in turn attenuate perceived loneliness (Pittman & Reich, 2016).
Therefore, gratifications generated from exposures to the creative and ephemeral content may stimulate the involvement with Instagram Stories.
In addition to consuming, participants of this research also contributed to Instagram Stories to express themselves and interact with the content as well as with others. Specifically, the social sharing and social interaction motivations were found to drive both contributing and creating behaviors on Instagram Stories. While social sharing through contributing to Instagram Stories refers to engaging in
self-presentation, self-expression, and self-assurance behaviors (Muntinga et al., 2011), Millennial users were found to contribute to Instagram Stories to present their personalities, shape their identities, and receive recognition from others in order to gain self-assurance. With the development of virtual communities, they can connect and interact regarding shared interests, social support, sociability, and identity (Wellman, 2001). Moreover, Instagram Stories’ fleeting nature indeed limits the content viewing time, which facilitates users’ urge to respond (Bayer et al., 2016), and thus accelerates social interaction. Also, the phenomenon is considered associated with Millennials’ desire for immediate gratification, since their attention spans are usually limited (Flecha-Ortíz, Santos-Corrada, Dones-González, López-González, &
Vega, 2019).
Finally, Instagram Stories users reported that they created content for
recognition-seeking, social sharing, interaction, and novelty. Interaction was found to be the major motivation for creating Instagram Stories, followed by social sharing, recognition-seeking, and novelty motivation. Out of Millennials’ desire to be visible in their social networks (Flecha-Ortíz et al., 2019), they create, produce, design, edit,
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or publish Instagram Stories to express their personal identities or opinions and maintain their social relationships through its novel features. By expressing
themselves on Instagram Stories, users may feel empowered and exert influence on others (Muntinga et al., 2011; DeVeirman et al., 2017). For example, a user can tag the location of a restaurant and post his/her experiences in that restaurant on
Instagram Stories to share or to influence others’ future decisions to go there. While maintaining social relationships has the potential to “subtly embrace us in the warmth of self-affirmation, the whispers of encouragement, and the meaningfulness of
belonging” (Hughes, Waite, Hawkley, & Cacioppo, 2004, p. 1), Millennials’ social relationships developed and maintained on SNSs may as well provide positive effects (e.g., happiness). In support of this notion, the findings also show that Millennials create Instagram Stories to feel a sense of belonging, so they share self-related information to receive responses from others.
5.3. Engagement with Instagram Stories and Emotional Outcomes The results showed that engagement with Instagram Stories is associated with both positive and negative emotions, corresponding to Weinstein’s (2018) findings.
Nevertheless, consistent with Lin and Utz’s (2015) study, the current study found that positive emotions were more prevalent than negative ones when users used Instagram Stories. Specifically, Instagram Stories use was positively associated with positive emotions, such as joy, contentment, optimism, peacefulness, and excitement.
Participants exhibited stronger emotions in joy, contentment, optimism, peacefulness, excitement, surprise, love and romantic love during Instagram Stories use. While entertainment is related to all types of online engagement activities (Muntinga et al., 2011), a possible explanation is that the visual and functional aspect of the feature is entertaining, funny and enjoyable so that users gain gratifications from it. Plus, with the real-time exchange of texts, stickers, images, videos, or voices via direct messages, interaction with others on Instagram Stories can render users to feel more intimate, connected and less solitude (Yang, 2016). Therefore, in line with Pittman and Reich’s (2016) and Bayer et al.’s (2016) findings, the use of Instagram Stories can attenuate users’ loneliness and increase their happiness, and that the real-time of exposure to Instagram Stories produces emotional gratification effects.
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On the other hand, participants showed relatively fewer negative emotions during using Instagram Stories; however, negative emotions such as envy, loneliness, discontent, worry, sadness, anger, shame, and fear were still found to be associated with Instagram Stories use. Specifically, the results showed that envy, loneliness, and discontent were found to the major negative emotional outcomes of Instagram Stories use. Although negative emotions are less likely to be experienced during Instagram Stories use, it is plausible that through social comparisons, users may feel insufficient and dissatisfied with their own lives, and maliciously envy others’ happiness and ways of spending vacations and socializing, which might diminish their own life satisfaction. Yet, on the other hand, if the Stories are from strong or close ties (i.e., family, friends), users may be more likely to be happy for them and experience benign envy (Lin & Utz, 2015). Even though social comparison on social media can be the
“thief of joy,” it is not the stimulant of negative emotions (De Vries et al., 2018).
Interacting with others and browsing Instagram Stories can decrease the feelings of loneliness owing to the comforts provided by Instagram Stories, whereas frequent Instagram Stories broadcasting may signify loneliness (Yang, 2016), because users who post Instagram Stories frequently might seek for support or attention from others (Blight, Jagiello, & Ruppel, 2015).
5.4. Engagement, Emotions, and Social Media Dependency
As expected, engagement with Instagram Stories was found to have a significant positive impact on social media dependency. Align with the literature that a high level of engagement plays a predictive role in addictive use of Internet activities (Charlton, 2002; Fan et al., 2017), this study found that participants who highly engaged in using Instagram Stories tended to become dependent on the feature. This could be
understood that as users obtain a variety of gratifications from using Instagram Stories, they may find the experience of using Instagram Stories enjoyable and immersing, which, in turn, makes them rely on Instagram Stories. In this way, the more users engage with Instagram Stories, the more likely they are to experience addictive use of Instagram Stories and become dependent on it.
While this research provides empirical support to the positive relationship between engagement with Instagram Stories and social media dependency, the findings also reveal that engagement with Instagram Stories is positively related to
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positive and negative emotions, and that both types of emotions were positively associated with social media dependency. That is, both positive and negative emotions mediate the relationship between engagement and social media dependency.
In line with Turel et al.’s (2011) and Chou and Hsiao’s (2000) conclusions that pleasant feelings play a critical role in social media dependency, and that pleasurable experiences related to the Internet are found to be a crucial determinant of the Internet addiction development, the current study found that participants with higher levels of engagement with Instagram Stories tended to experience positive emotions during the usage. What’s more, the functionality of Instagram Stories, especially the full screen format with pictures and videos, provide such entertaining and enjoyable experience to users, and users can gain instant gratifications from using it, which can lead to social media dependency (Donnelly & Kuss, 2016).In line with this point, the findings also indicate that, as users experience positive emotions when using Instagram Stories, they are more likely to excessively and obsessively using and constantly preoccupied by Instagram Stories (Altuwairiqi et al., 2019; Donnelly & Kuss, 2016).
However, negative emotions were found to be more predictive than positive emotions regarding social media dependency. That is, even though positive emotions were more prevalent during Instagram Stories use than negative emotions, negative emotions were more related to social media dependency. While this study confirms previous findings that negative factors (e.g., negative affect anticipation and
depression) relate to social media dependency (LaRose et al., 2003; Wang et al., 2015), there are several possible explanations. First, as users expose themselves frequently to Instagram Stories created by others, they might compare themselves with others when they find similarities between themselves and the target of comparison (Corcoran, Crusius, & Musweiler, 2011). For instance, users might envy others when noticing others’ advantages (e.g., luxury lives). In spite of upward or downward social comparison, users would want to know what others are doing through the process of social comparison, and this can enhance their dependency on Instagram Stories.
Second, those with higher levels of loneliness or depression and lower levels of self-identification are more likely to psychologically rely on Instagram Stories for the avenue to express and interact (Han, Han, Qu, Li, & Zhu, 2019). In this sense, users might turn to Instagram Stories to dispel their loneliness or depression, interact with others, and seek comforts and social support. Another possible explanation is that
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users might try to avoid unpleasant feelings (e.g., fear, anxiety, or loss) and desire to modify their emotions and pursue such rewarding experiences by gaining pleasant feelings (e.g., excitement, joy, or elation), which leads to the development of addictive social media usage (Young, 1999). Therefore, negative emotions are more related to social media dependency than positive emotions.
As a result, this study illustrates that the relationship between engagement with Instagram Stories and social media dependency is mediated by both positive and negative emotions, yet the mediating role of negative emotions is stronger than positive emotions. Namely, the more Millennials engage with Instagram Stories, the more reliant they are on it through the increasing emotions.
5.5. Research Contributions
The current study sheds light on what makes Instagram Stories appealing to people and contributes to U&G research literature of social media by exploring the relatively new feature, Instagram Stories. First, to identify specific motivations related to Instagram Stories use, this study utilized the pretest to collect the U&G items from Instagram Stories users, and integrated the motives emerged from the result of the pretest with those for social media use identified in previous U&G literature (e.g., Lee et al., 2015; Sheldon & Bryant, 2016), such as information-seeking, social interaction, archiving, self-expression, surveillance/knowledge about others, coolness, and
creativity. The motives classified in this study are rendered to be suitable for the context of Instagram Stories. For example, the limited time of Instagram Stories provokes perceived scarcity (Lynn, 1991) and facilitates interactions with others. In addition, the visual functions of the feature offer users ways of more direct and enjoyable communication compared to texts. Moreover, users engage in Instagram Stories by consuming, contributing to, and creating content for different purposes, explaining what makes Instagram Stories appealing to people. While the extant studies have focused less on Instagram than on other social media platforms such as Facebook (De Vries et al., 2018), the enormous popularity of Instagram among young people discloses the significance for researchers and practitioners to understand not only why they use Instagram in general, but also how they engage with specific Instagram features (i.e., Instagram Stories). This study thus advances our understanding of the usage of Instagram Stories.
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Furthermore, another theoretical contribution made to understanding users’ psychological consequences of using Instagram Stories is investigating the relationships between engagement with Instagram Stories, emotional outcomes of such usage, and social media dependency on it. While the effects of such engagement on users’ emotional well-being (Duggan, 2015; Newcom, 2016) have gained
attentions from researchers and practitioners, Instagram Stories use is found to generate more positive emotional experiences than negative ones. Users might become addictive of and rely on using Instagram Stories when they make social comparison, feel isolated, and want to gain more social support and pleasant feelings.
Whereas the literature suggests that social media use is associated with both positive and negative emotions (Weinstein, 2018), and that Instagram use is related to mood (Lup et al., 2015), this study fills the gap to understand what emotions users
experience when using Instagram Stories, and how engagement and different emotions can lead to social media dependency.
In sum, this research sheds light on what makes Instagram Stories appealing to Millennials, expanding the U&G theoretical framework as well as contributing to literature on psychological consequences of engagement in SNSs.
5.6. Limitations and Future Research
Apart from the important findings, the current research has limitations that need to be addressed. First, while this study examines how engagement may influence social media dependency, it is also possible for future studies to consider whether social media dependency can impact engagement. As social media platforms may differ depending on the theme, user demographics, or different focus they have (Mull
& Lee, 2014), and that this research focuses on a specific demographic group:
Millennials in the U.S., the results may not be generalized and applied to other demographic groups or SNS usage in different countries, as residential locations and cultural differences might influence individuals’ social media use. Therefore, future studies may pay attention to social media use of other generational cohorts such as Gen Z, or people from other countries to increase the validity of constructs and findings emerged from this research. Another sample limitation could be that even though the quality of MTurk samples is supported by the previous research (e.g., Berinsky et al., 2012), participants recruited from MTurk may not fully represent the
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general population in the U.S. In addition, while this research employed self-reported assessments for studying the constructs of interest for both the pretest and the main study, future studies are suggested to use in-depth interviews to gain deeper insights into Instagram Stories usage. Future studies may also look into actual expression to explore unstructured text or patterns by using different research approaches (e.g., text analysis, content analysis, or pattern analysis) (Choi & Sung, 2018).
While this study elucidates that engagement with Instagram Stories has positive impacts on social media dependency through both positive and negative emotions, further investigations may explore other antecedents of peoples’
dependency on social media, and examine how to reduce the plausible negative outcomes of social media dependency (e.g., Turel & Serenko, 2010), which could enrich this line of research. Even though Instagram is reported to be the most detrimental SNS for youngsters’ mental health, such as negatively affecting body images and sleep patterns, and adding a sense of the fear of missing out (FOMO) (Macmillan, 2017), the findings illuminate that compared with positive emotions, negative emotions are less prevalent on Instagram Stories, which affirms that Instagram Stories can also be a positive outlet for many young people’s
self-expression and self-identity (Fox, 2017), and this can be put into further discussion in the future.
Recently, as Instagram has had “likes” hidden in the feed, it was reported that the majority felt positively about this change in terms of improving well-being (Yurieff, 2019). Although it remains unknown how this move can impact Instagram users, future research may be conducted to examine whether hiding “likes” on Instagram is effective in improving users’ emotional and psychological well-being.
5.7. Conclusion
Given that more and more young adults use Instagram Stories and spend more time on it, it is important for researchers and practitioners to delineate users’
psychology and behaviors on Instagram Stories. With the exploratory attempt of analyzing Instagram Stories usage and resulting psychological consequences, this research explicates that Millennials use Instagram Stories mainly for exploration, recognition-seeking, perceived functionality, entertainment, social sharing, interaction, novelty, and surveillance, and they engage in Instagram Stories through consuming,
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contributing, and creating content. Generally, they consume Instagram Stories for entertainment and its unique functions, contribute to it to express themselves and interact with others, and create content for social sharing, interaction, recognition seeking, and novelty. While Instagram Stories can elicit both positive and negative emotions, it was found that positive emotions pervade more than negative emotions.
Besides, the current study demonstrates that there is a statistically significant relationship between engagement with Instagram Stories and social media dependency, and between engagement and emotional outcomes. Findings also highlight that there is a positive relationship between both positive and negative emotions and social media dependency. To the researcher’s knowledge, this is the first study to develop the typology of motivations for Instagram Stories use and examine the relationships between Instagram Stories use with emotions and social media dependency. Although future research is invited to demonstrate other possible variables affecting Instagram Stories usage and social media dependency using
Besides, the current study demonstrates that there is a statistically significant relationship between engagement with Instagram Stories and social media dependency, and between engagement and emotional outcomes. Findings also highlight that there is a positive relationship between both positive and negative emotions and social media dependency. To the researcher’s knowledge, this is the first study to develop the typology of motivations for Instagram Stories use and examine the relationships between Instagram Stories use with emotions and social media dependency. Although future research is invited to demonstrate other possible variables affecting Instagram Stories usage and social media dependency using