Parents play an important role in the life of their children. They act as role models, showing their children ways to think as well as what behavior is appropriate. When a child is becoming an adolescent, the peers often take over as role models -also called socialization agents in sociology. In fact, adolescents try to be conform to their peers and view belonging to a social group as a form of identity development. Social rejection from their peers can lead to negative feelings and consequences for their personal development. In summary, adolescence is marked from a need of belongingness and the fear of rejection. Furthermore, adolescents have to find their own individual identity while they are sharing a social identity with their peers.
The social media platform Facebook creates a space where adolescents can interact with their friends. It is also a tool used to expose their identity, express themselves and receive the recognition from their peers. Users can choose the content they want to publish and therefore influence how they are perceived by others.
These facts lead us to think that peers have an impact on an adolescent’s identity construction and we have hypothesized that adolescents create their own identity through the online interaction with peers on Facebook. More specifically, we focused on the way they adapt their self-image online. In order to study this question we chose a semi-directed interview based on the Groningen Identity Development Scale (Bosma, 1994), with 17 open questions. The sample was composed of nine adolescents aged 15 to 17 years, three of each age, five girls and four boys. The interview was constructed to firstly investigate the activity of the adolescents on Facebook and secondly, the role of peers in their lives. As a third aspect, we tried to find how they perceive their self-image and think it’s perceived from others. A thematic analysis was chosen to extract the recurring and divergent themes.
The results indicate that Facebook is an important tool for adolescents’ everyday communication with their peers. Facebook, among others, is used to avoid boredom or to stay up to date. Furthermore, we found that they aim to adapt the self-image they create on Facebook to the norms their peers established. The adolescents in the study identify the requirements, values and norms from their social group in order to be accepted and to belong to them. More precisely, we found that among those who communicate often via Facebook with their peers, only half adapts their self-image to their peers. Furthermore, boys tend to develop their identity independently from the communication with others while girls give a greater meaning to what their peers think of them. On the other hand, those who rarely communicate with their peers on Facebook, mostly do not seek to adapt their self-image. In addition, we found a lack of self-confidence in the girls’ sample, which leads to a more passive use of Facebook in comparison to the boys’ sample.
In conclusion, the adolescents in our study seem to create their identity through the interaction with their peers online. They seem to act in a way in which they adapt to the behaviors and attitudes of their peers on Facebook and try to be conform to them. The intersubjective interaction with the peers on Facebook therefore contributes to the creation of identity.
Bosma, H. A. (1994). Le développement de l’identité à l’adolescence. L’Orientation Scolaire et Professionnelle, 23(3), 291-311.
Claes, M. (2003). L’univers social des adolescents. Montréal : Presse universitaire de Montréal.
Erikson, E. H. (1968). Identity – Youth and Crisis. New York : Norton & Company.
Fluckiger, C. (2016). Blogs et réseaux sociaux, outils de la construction identitaire adolescente ? Diversité, 162, 38-43.
