Influence Of Social Media

INTRODUCTION

Ninety percent of American young adults (ages 18 to 29) use social media (Pew Research Center, 2015). According to Pew Research Center (2015), women are more likely to use social media than men. It is important, then, to consider the impact of young females’ presence on social media networks such as Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook and how these platforms influence decision making processes.

RESEARCH TERRITORY Literature in this field has addressed the relationship between a female’s social media use and her perception of self (i.e. body image). Scholars in these fields, however, have not yet adequately addressed the relationship between a female’s dietary choices and her use of social media networking platforms. This lack of knowledge is harmful because social media users are uninformed about the consequences of their online participation.

Holmberg, Chaplin, Hillman, and Berg (2016) researched the way in which adolescents present food on social media. The researchers claim that the majority of food photos posted by adolescents were of foods with a low nutritional profile. These researchers used content analysis in order to analyze both the type of photos posted by adolescents as well as the written content captioning these images. Holmberg et al. (2015) aimed to analyze content that was

These methods include a content analysis and netnography. A content analysis is often beneficial in making an argument about how a particular form of media functions because it aims to describe the characteristics of communication methods and then make claims about those descriptions. Netnographies are ethnographies performed using Web-based material. An ethnography is the study of people. Researchers can perform an ethnography in order to find patterns in the behaviours of those being studied (in this case, social media users) and develop questions based on