Article | Open Access
Urban & Online: Social Media Use among Adolescents and Sense of Belonging to a Super-Diverse City
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Abstract: In a world of continuous migration, super-diverse cities consist of a multitude of migrants and non-migrants from a variety of cultural backgrounds. Yet one characteristic they all have in common is the place where they currently live. In addition, both groups are active users of social media, especially the young. Social media provide platforms to construct and negotiate one’s identity—particularly the identity related to where one lives: urban identity. This article presents the results of a survey study (N = 324) investigating the relationships between social media engagement and identity construction among migrant and non-migrant adolescents in the super-diverse city of Rotterdam, the Netherlands. It was found that urban identity was significantly higher for migrants than non-migrants. Certain aspects of social media engagement predicted urban identity in combination with social identity. Finally, social media engagement was found to be positively related to group self-esteem.
Keywords: adolescents; identity construction; migration; Rotterdam; self-esteem; social media; super-diversity; urban identity
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© Anne k. van Eldik, Julia Kneer, Jeroen Jansz. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits any use, distribution, and reproduction of the work without further permission provided the original author(s) and source are credited.