"Fick jag bara 560 likes?" : En kvalitativ studie om hur ungdomar upplever press på Instagram

Sammanfattning: Low self-confidence and self-esteem are common among young people. Often, this is a result of the ideals that Instagram users create. With editing tools, adolescents are able to present a better version of themselves – a version they are proud of. However, the ideal of the "perfect person" creates a negative impact, which generates stress. The stress means that young people present themselves in different ways in the pursuit of validation. At the same time, there is a lack of knowledge concerning how this stress affects them and their lives. The aim of this study is, therefore, to explore how young people experience pressure on Instagram. To find out young people's experiences, it was important to talk to them. Therefore, we chose to do twelve qualitative interviews with 18-year-old adolescents in Karlstad, Sweden. From previous research, we were able to identify five different negative influences that generate stress, which were: social acceptance, status, achievements, body image and sexual self-presentation. These negative influences were our starting points when our study was designed. The main research question was "How do young people experience stress on Instagram. We then asked questions that covered the five previous identifed negative influences. By starting from these, we could also distinguish two new negative influences that generate pressure: lifestyle stress, and the stress to collect ”likes,” which we call ”like stress” for short. Lifestyle stress means that young people feel compelled to have a perfect life in the pursuit of validation and likes. Not only do adolescents feel they should have perfect lives online, but they must also live these lives offline. Furthermore, young people are competing to see who manages to show off the most perfect life on Instagram. It emerged in our study that the negative influences of body image, sexual self-presentation, performance and lifestyle are dependent on likes, which made it possible to identify ”like stress” as another variable. This means that young people feel pressured to present themselves in different ways in the pursuit of likes on Instagram. To explain the interdependence between the various negative influences that generate stress, we designed a model named ”The model of Likestress”. The model explains how the social acceptance and status are linked to body image, sexual self-presentation, performance and lifestyle through like stress. In future, it will be important to understand how large a role Instagram plays for young people, as stress can affect their identity development.