Social Media Literacy Among Adolescents and Young Adults: Results From a Cross-Country Validation Study

Abstract

When being online, young users are often confronted with insulting, hateful, or misleading messages. To handle these dark forms of participation, it is essential to equip them with resources that support their social literacy in today’s complex online environments. In the present article, we deployed a previously established scale on self-perceived participatory-moral literacy and conducted a broad online survey study with 1,489 adolescents and young adults aged 16–22 years ( M = 19.74; SD = 1.65; 51% female) across eight different European countries (Austria, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Slovakia, and the United Kingdom). The results provided a configural identical model of participatory-moral abilities, motivation, and behavior across the considered European countries. We could confirm weak invariance, satisfactory psychometric qualities, and convergent validity of the scale across the different countries. Implications for digital literacy research are discussed.