Learning to exist: A grounded theory about adolescent’s motivation to learn in social media

Nadia Naffi, M.A. [email protected] Davidson, Ph.D. [email protected]

In the present context, in which adolescents are integrating social media to their lives, and engaging in extensive online interactions, it is becoming essential to understand how they mentally construe their practices in social media and whether they are conscious of learning instances happening during their interactions. Such knowledge could enlighten parents about what captivates their children and practitioners about what captivates studentsʼ attention.

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Todayʼs adolescents use social media fluently and they are passionate about technological tools that allow them to communicate with each other on a minute-by-minute basis. This studyʼs objective was to understand adolescentsʼ practices with social media, the methods they use to construe learning inside their online networks and the kind of learning they think is possible with these emerging technologies.

A review of the recent studies on social media and its uses by adolescents resulted in the emergence of three focal topics: the first was technology and its uses (boyd & Ellison, 2007; Valkenburg & Peter, 2009; Margalit, 2010; Van Cleemput, 2010), the second was adolescents as social media users (Subrahmanyam, Garcia, Harsono et al., 2009; Lehdonvirta & Rasanen, 2011, and the third was informal learning (Ito, Baumer, Bittanti, boyd et al., 2008; Greenhow & Robelia, 2009; Saul, 2010; Varnhagen, McFall, Pugh et al., 2010). Although many studies provided descriptive statistics on the extent to which adolescents used social media, little research explored the motivation that triggered informal learning and their representations of how they learn with social media.




We adopted a qualitative-interpretive methodological protocol. We recruited ten participants (14-16 years old) through a mix of purposeful and snowball samplings. The requirement was that they actively used social media including instant messaging for more than three years. Three instruments were used to conduct the study, which allowed us to gather a global picture that provides an answer to our two research questions.

10 adolescents




The preliminary results from this study showed that adolescents do not intentionally use social media to learn. They are informally learning how to use the medium and unintentionally learning managerial and socialization skills and accessing the group knowledge through effortless interactions with their friends. The participantsʼ main objective for using social media was to have fun, connect with others and fulfill their need of belonging. Although they used social learning to learn about the technology and used social media applications as collaborative tools to facilitate their school learning, they felt that it was part of their usual conversation with their friends, as a natural way of doing things, without noticing the fact that social media is actually providing them with new learning tools and techniques that fit their needs and preferences. They only realized that learning was happening when the researcher asked about it and pointed out some of their experiences as examples of informal learning. It would be interesting, as a following-up procedure, to explore how the usage of social media can evolve when adolescents become conscious of its potential to serve them as a learning tool.





This studyʼs results are similar to those conducted by many researchers in social media. However, our results differ from the literature because the methodology we used allowed to develop a deeper understanding of the meaning of adolescentsʼ experience with social media. The methodology we used also allowed participants to reflect on what, how and why they learn in social media.






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Learning to exist: A grounded theory about adolescent’s motivation to learn in social media