Adolescents’ Social Comparisons, Subjective Social Status, and Coping to Maintain Well-Being: A Qualitative Study

Abstract

Income inequality has increased in the United States over the past decades and, more recently, social media has expanded adolescents’ reference groups and their field of social comparison. These parallel societal changes may influence adolescents’ social identity development and affect their well-being. We interviewed adolescents in contact with health services to understand their experiences with social status differences and social comparisons. In this sample of adolescents, social comparisons varied, based on context and individual characteristics, and were associated with a range of feelings and coping mechanisms. We highlight the implications of the findings in the context of changing societal dynamics.

Introduction

One in four adolescents experiences emotional distress globally, with depression being among the most common disorders (Knopf et al. 2008; Silva et al. 2020). In the United States, the prevalence of adolescent depression has increased significantly in recent decades (Daly 2022; Mojtabai, Olfson, and Han 2016), with a steep increase since the introduction and widespread use of smartphones and social media (Twenge et al. 2018), and, more recently, in the context of disruption of in-person activity (Jones, Mitra, and Bhuiyan 2021) and increased online activity (Marciano et al. 2022) during the COVID-19 pandemic.

At a societal level, income inequality is associated with worse mental health problems (Pickett, James, and Wilkinson 2006) and could be another potential driver of the increase in adolescent depression. Income inequality is particularly relevant in the United States, a country with the highest income inequality index among developed nations (Saez and Zucman 2016; Sommeiller, Price, and Wazeter 2016). This increasingly unequal and expanded social environment is a historically recent development, as humans traditionally lived in societies with more egalitarian close-knit communities (Erdal and Whiten 1996), and may lead to individual psychological effects.

At the individual level, subjective social status (SSS), or a person’s beliefs about their relative social status (Adler and Stewart 2010), has been recognized as a better indicator of the health effects of social status and as more amenable to intervention than socioeconomic status (SES; McLaughlin et al. 2012). SSS has also been associated with depression in adolescents (Goodman et al. 2001, Vidal and Latkin 2020).

The mechanisms linking social status and depression may implicate social comparisons. Social comparisons processes theory, coined by L. A. Festinger in his 1954 seminal paper, postulates that humans constantly self-evaluate by comparing themselves with others. Certain types of social comparisons, such as upward comparisons (or comparisons with others who are better off), have been associated with depression (Borelli and Prinstein 2006). In recent years, social media has increased the opportunities for social comparisons (Nesi and Prinstein 2015; Niu et al. 2018) and is increasingly recognized as a contributor to low mood among adolescents (Steers, Wickham, and Acitelli 2014; Twenge et al. 2018). Yet, even before the advent of social media, adolescence was characterized as a period of expansion of the number of possible social reference groups, which makes it a critical period for status-based identity (Destin et al. 2017). Beliefs about one’s social status are linked to elements of identity that not only include SES but also gender and ethnicity (Goodman et al. 2007). While adults mainly construct their social status by cognitively averaging measures of one’s income, education, and occupation (Adler et al. 2000), the dimensions of comparison may be different in adolescents (Sweeting et al. 2010; Sweeting and Hunt 2014; Vannatta et al. 2009).

There is a growing interest in the role of social comparisons on adolescent depression in the context of the expansion of use of social media; however, the mechanisms involved in social comparisons in youth are less well understood. In this research report, we discuss the findings of a study conducted with adolescents in contact with health services to understand their experiences with social status differences and social comparisons. We focus on social comparisons and the dimensions of comparison that adolescents use when inferring their social status, the feelings that arise from such comparisons, and the coping mechanisms used to reestablish psychological equilibrium. We also highlight the implications of these findings for today’s adolescents’ well-being, as they become more aware of social differences through social media.

Method

Sample

We recruited a total of 23 adolescents through fliers and after referral from health providers at outpatient health centers. Adolescents who gave assent and whose parent/guardian gave consent were interviewed in private rooms at five different clinical sites (three pediatricians’ clinics, a community mental health clinic, and a child and adolescent psychiatry partial hospitalization program). We chose these sites expecting that they would present a higher presence of adolescents presenting with physical or mental health distress, and to follow maximum variation sampling that seeks to include a wide variety of participants to be able to compare them among themselves. Therefore, while we were interested in a population with mental health difficulties, who were more likely to be depressed, we also recruited from sites where adolescents not in distress would be present. These sites serve populations of various incomes and neighborhood environments, reflective of socioeconomic differences. This process increases the chances that the findings reflect contrasting perspectives (Creswell 2007), which was a preferable approach for this exploratory qualitative study.

We included patients who were (1) between the ages of 12 and 17 years, (2) able to speak and read English and/or Spanish, and (3) accompanied by a parent or guardian who could provide consent. The clinic staff asked adolescents and their parents about their willingness to participate in the study during their health visit and relayed the information to us. We then approached the adolescents and explained the study. We told parents and adolescents that the study consisted of interviews about how adolescents perceive themselves with respect to the rest of society. If the prospective participants expressed interest, we obtained consent from the parent after the adolescent gave assent.

Setting

We conducted the interviews in private rooms in an outpatient clinic and a hospital floor in Baltimore, Maryland. At the time, Maryland had the highest median household income in the United States and relatively less income inequality than the majority of states (Sommeiller et al. 2016). Still, 13.2% of Maryland’s children lived below the poverty line in 2016, with an income below $24,600 for a family of four (Department of Health and Human Services [DHHS] 2018). In Baltimore, 33.3% of children were living below the poverty line, with rates of poverty among neighborhoods ranging from 0.1% to 65.3% in 2016 (Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance [BNIA] 2018). The marked contrast between the city and the surrounding counties and among neighborhoods within the city is compounded by an accelerating process of gentrification (from 9% of city census tracts classified as gentrifying from the years 1990 to 2000 to 23.2% after the year 2000; Governing, the States and Localities 2017). Currently, Baltimore is among the most gentrified cities in the United States (National Community Reinvestment Coalition 2019).

Procedure

We conducted face-to-face in-depth interviews in English and/or Spanish between February 2016 and September 2016. Each adolescent was interviewed once. The materials used included a semi-structured guide, with open-ended questions inquiring about the adolescent’s immediate and distal environment, their relationships, and the social comparisons they made. For example, we asked the adolescents whether they compared themselves with people “on social media sites (such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter), other media (people on TV, YouTube, celebrities)?” Or how they felt when they saw themselves in “a worse situation financially than other people” around them.

We audio-recorded the interviews and two research assistants transcribed them verbatim. The first author also wrote memos after each interview. We assigned numbers to the interviewees to protect their anonymity. The interviews lasted between 12.5 and 40.3 minutes, with an average of 28.3 minutes. Not all of the participants contributed a significant amount of information on the topic of social status, leading to the decreased mean duration of the interviews. Those adolescents who completed the study received a $25 gift card. The study was approved by the institutional review board at the University’s School of Medicine.

Data Analysis

The documents were uploaded to the software ATLAS to facilitate coding. The two authors reviewed and discussed transcripts with the purpose of understanding the general meaning of the interviews and memos. Both authors are child and adolescent psychiatrists, and one of them (L.W.) is also a pediatrician. We both have experience treating clinical disorders in adolescents and share a particular interest in the effects of social determinants on health. We reread clusters of statements for each adolescent and discussed them. The steps were not unidirectional, but circular and involved reviewing prior understandings of the content of the interviews in the light of new ones. Significant statements that pertained to the lived experienced of constructing one’s social status were coded into meanings. Those meanings were then clustered into themes, which were underlying cognitions common to most of the adolescents. We contrasted the findings with external sources through literature searches and interviewed until saturation was achieved (Meadows and Morse 2001; Moustakas 1995). In the final steps, we involved three undergraduate students who reviewed and compared codes of six interviews and discussed them in a collaborative analysis group, which counted toward their course credit. The results were also shared with two adolescents who provided validation of the findings, after completing their own interviews.

Findings

Participants were adolescent girls (n = 13) and boys (n = 10) with an average age of 15.3 years (SD = 1.4). Fifteen adolescents were Black, five were White, two were Hispanic, and one was Asian. All of the adolescents were students in middle or high school. Sixteen adolescents lived in Baltimore City and seven lived outside of the city. Seven adolescents came from families with an annual income below $34,000, seven had an income between $34,001 and $120,000, and three had annual household income above $120,000. The parents of five participants did not report income.

Four themes emerged from the significant statements gathered from the participants.

Characteristics of the Surroundings

The adolescents we interviewed appraised multiple, complex social and physical environments when constructing their social status. They made observations about domains such as the neighborhood and school. For example, the lack or presence of amenities, housing conditions (boarded up housing vs. “mansions”), levels of violence, pollution, trash, and access to public transit or green spaces informed the status of the people who lived in those communities. School culture could set the values and dimensions in which the adolescents compared themselves with their peers. If peers focused more on appearances or sports abilities versus academics, adolescents who performed better academically could also perceive themselves to be of lower social status, despite their greater academic success. For example, an adolescent girl who was a good student explained that she felt she was of lower status in her school because students in her school were more concerned about appearances, possessions, and popularity, and less on academics, explaining that “school, I guess is not important to people. They just care about the kind of stuff you have.”

School peers’ financial status, in addition to popularity and grades, contributed to the adolescents’ SSS. Other people’s status could be implied by observation of their ability to participate in activities that required a fee; to buy clothes, lunch, and newer video games; or have access to opportunities. One of the adolescents who attended a public school in a wealthy school district noted that she had friends who had opportunities to which she did not have access: “where someone would be able to go out and meet senators” (16, White, girl).

Other people’s opinions about the adolescents mattered to them to a degree that depended on the quality of the relationship. We differentiated between “distal” social contacts that involved a reference group, with whom the adolescent had a superficial relationship or no personal relationship, and “proximal” contacts, which we used to describe as relationships with a certain degree of trust and deeper mutual knowledge. Social comparisons with distal contacts extended to celebrities and popular people on social media.

Obviously these people have like these amazing things, and are very pretty and beautiful and so I don’t feel great about myself but I mean it’s hard to compare yourself to someone who’s like on that platform and not feel bad about yourself!

(16, White, girl)

Proximal contacts included family members and close friends, and they contributed to the adolescents’ social status in different ways; they provided evidence of the complexities of other people who were not readily judged by superficial characteristics, and they reflected on the adolescent. For example, one adolescent considered her status to be higher due to living in an involved family:

My family, they just like to see all the kids succeed and other families is just like either they don’t care or they care too much and they are pushing their child too far.

(14, Black, girl)

Characteristics of Oneself

Adolescents made social comparisons with varied frequency and intensity. For some, the fact that they were drawn to make comparisons was in itself a source of discomfort. Others thought that one should not consciously compare, or should only do it in positive ways.

Oh, I think that I get thrown into comparison all the time. Everyone compares themselves to everybody else. But to me, my friends and my classmates, they don’t really … we don’t really do it to offend each other. We just do it, to help build each other up.

(13, White, boy)

While some adolescents did not feel that social comparisons influenced their mood or thoughts, others felt that these comparisons generated negative feelings such as envy, and these feelings could be a potential cause of conflict and even violence.

I feel as though you shouldn’t compare yourself because if you compare yourself a lot you find to either make yourself feel bad or … and you act out, you act differently because of that, and you also envy the other person…

(15, Black, boy)

We identified different dimensions in which the adolescents made social comparisons. For example, they focused on their financial status, physical appearance, involvement in activities, material possessions (phones, clothes), grades, popularity, and ability (sports, Internet skills, and number of “likes” on social media sites). They also made comparisons about virtues and moral values (i.e., being nice to other people) and not just academic achievement, skills, and material possessions.

It doesn’t always have to be grade-wise. Because there are some people who have way lower grades than me, but I respect them, almost as much as other people respect me as a person … because I feel like they are more socially well off.

(13, White, boy)

Financial status was a common marker of SSS. Self-evaluations included both present financial status and future prospects. Future employment was a concern for adolescents of both higher and lower SES. Financial deprivation had the added disruption of limiting social participation in group activities (inability to attend field trips) or the acquisition of items that signified membership in the reference group (school supplies or clothes that their peers would admire). Overall, participants were less concerned about the future than they were about the implications for current activities and group membership.

I was like, “oh I wish, you know, we had the money for it, so I could go on the field trip, ’cause I know it’s probably gonna be fun,” or like when people would talk about the field trip I would just like get upset because I’m just like “my mom can’t afford it.”

(14, Black, girl)

Assessment of One’s Social Status and Emotional Response

The adolescents interviewed shared experiences of positive and negative feelings when assessing their social status. Negative feelings included anger, jealousy, shame, anxiety about their future, discouragement, guilt over having more than others, and sense of unfairness. These feelings were negative, especially when the adolescents assessed themselves to be of lower social status or they had little financial and political power to exert change. One of the adolescents expressed her low sense of control and feelings of demoralization when talking about the future, saying that “no matter how hard I work there are certain things that aren’t going to happen and I can’t just work really hard and a lot of it’s luck and you know … who you know” (16, White, girl).

The negative feelings related to differences in social status also occurred when disparities were observed with peers of a lower status, suggesting that adolescents experienced discomfort with overall inequality and not only with their own financial difficulties.

I feel bad for the people who are less privileged than I am and then I feel bad in my way how I am not as privileged as other kids. ’Cause there are those … you know … better, more popular, better looking kids that you, like at my school, they are richer and they have a lot more stuff … and then there’re the less fortunate kids.

(13, White, girl)

Adolescents also experienced positive feelings related to observed differences in social status. These feelings included feeling optimistic when the adolescents believed that their current financial deprivation would make them more resilient. They also expressed feeling motivated to improve their social status at a future time when they had more control. Those who perceived themselves to be of a higher status than their peers, especially when comparing their social status, expressed feeling thankful and feeling special for their higher status.

Coping Strategies and Societal Opportunities for Intervention

The interviews allowed the adolescents to process their social status, reflect on the systemic reasons that caused their families to be financially deprived (when that was the case), and see solutions to their situation. Other participants found it helpful or even felt validated when openly discussing social comparisons and SSS as a universal experience in adolescents. These thoughts about status were dynamic and changed during the course of the interview. In addition, the participants identified several positive and negative coping strategies that they used to manage the feelings resulting from the social comparisons they made.

Negative coping mechanisms identified included blaming others, numbing, rationalizing, and socially isolating. Participants who experienced financial deprivation would sometimes blame their immediate family for not trying hard enough to provide. One of the adolescents interviewed blamed her mother for their financial status “because … she is the parent” and “she needs to find the way” (17, Black, girl). While adults would be expected to care and provide for their children, this adolescent’s comment denoted a lack of understanding of structural issues her parents may have confronted. Finding shortcomings in others was also a way to buffer the negative feelings that arose from making negative social comparisons: “Sometimes I’m really critical and I’m like ‘why do they spend so much, even if you have the money to spend so much money on like a hat, why would you?!’” (16, White, girl). One of the adolescents explained becoming numb to being judged by his peers. “Like people’s opinions doesn’t faze … kind of. It fazes me, like I know it messes me up, I am getting to a point where I let it not affect me. I don’t care anymore” [15, Black, boy].

Positive coping mechanisms included attending to the positives, avoiding making comparisons, and changing the environment. Several of the adolescents interviewed avoided making comparisons as they believed they were a source of conflict. We believed this was a good coping mechanism because avoiding comparing upward and being grateful and comparing downward contributes to positive mood and could contribute to less conflict. Similarly, making fewer social comparisons in settings such as social media, where the object of comparisons is so curated, would also help adolescents.

Around social media, I don’t really compare myself. All of my friends, all of my followers are either just like me or they got similarities to me, being family, being intelligence, being classes, because that is the type of person I am, I rather have people that are just like me, or close to me than people that are different. Because people that are different we are going to have conflicts and I don’t like conflicts.

(17, Black, girl)

The adolescents interviewed made efforts to pay attention to personal positive dimensions when faced with an overall negative assessment of their status, sometimes minimizing their personal or environmental shortcomings. As an example, the following quote of a participant shows that she was aware of her family’s financial deprivation, but that she was able to focus on the positive aspects of her family as the main source of self-evaluation. We believe that this refocusing attention on positive aspects of herself and her surroundings was adaptive.

I know friends with a lot of money, wealthy and everything, but they don’t have the love wealth that we have as a family.

[17, Black, girl]

A few of the participants felt that experiencing a situation of financial deprivation made them “stronger” and motivated to find themselves in a better situation as adults. One of the participants associated her past low mood and anxiety with her family’s financial circumstances, but these symptoms improved once she was allowed to have a job, giving her a sense of agency. In her case, age was an impediment to being able to feel helpful and in control. Yet we believed this could be concerning in the case of those adolescents who were pushed away from academics by this urgency to help their families monetarily.

Now I know that I can help her [my mother] because well, she finally let us get jobs and my brother has his job, and I am going to be starting a job soon.

(14, Black, girl)

In addition to the individual cognitive differences among adolescents, interventions in the school environment could minimize social differences. Adolescents directly or incidentally suggested academic, racial, and SES classroom integration as solutions when talking about the differences between students by academic level within a grade, or suggested more simple interventions, such as school uniforms, to decrease opportunities for social comparison.

I really honestly prefer the uniform so you don’t really worry about keeping up with today’s trend.

(17, Black, girl)

Discussion and Conclusion

In this exploratory study, consisting of interviews with a sample of diverse adolescents from a large metropolitan area, we aimed to describe some of the processes involved in social comparison and construction of social status identity. We found that the adolescents interviewed could easily relate to the concept of social comparison and reflect on what they made comparisons about, what they thought about the virtues of making comparisons, and how they managed their subsequent feelings. The study, conducted prior to the COVID pandemic, captured comparisons that seemed mostly related to in-person interactions; however, media (social and otherwise) comparisons came up either for the frequency with which one’s postings were “liked” or because it was the source of comparisons to individuals—often celebrities—of whom the adolescents had only superficial impressions.

The adolescents interviewed made ongoing and complex appraisals of their social and physical environments but varied in their tendency to make comparisons, with a range going from not comparing themselves with others at all or minimizing the comparisons, to frequently making comparisons and dwelling on them. In addition, the dimensions in which they compared themselves with others varied by individual and social context and were not limited to SES dimensions. The possibility of losing social connections may have been reason underlying the need to make social comparisons to gauge what was acceptable and respected by the peer group; however, this was not explicitly stated by the interviewees.

Consistent with previous research (Adler and Stewart 2010), social comparisons in our sample triggered positive and negative feelings in the adolescents, but often, and especially when they perceived themselves to be relatively low in status, they led to negative feelings. These findings are consistent with previous evidence of a link between social comparisons, negative affect (Lyubomirsky and Ross 1997), and destructive emotions and behaviors, especially when comparisons are frequent (White et al. 2006). However, some adolescents had positive feelings when comparing themselves with their peers regardless of whether they assessed themselves to be of higher or lower social status. When negative feelings resulted from social comparisons, adolescents used coping strategies. On many occasions, the strategies adolescents used are considered to be negative coping mechanisms, such as rationalization, criticism, social isolation, and numbing.

Studies have shown that individual characteristics, such as self-esteem, may influence one’s tendency to make social comparisons (Vogel et al. 2015) and that feedback-seeking and social comparison orientation are interpersonal behaviors that affect one’s tendency to experience depression (Borelli and Prinstein 2006). Despite evidence of the importance of social comparisons made on social media and their effects on well-being (Verduyn et al. 2020) amid rising prevalence of social media use at increasingly younger ages (Pew Research Center 2018), few studies have focused on children and adolescents (McCarthy and Morina 2020). The need to understand these processes in youth is essential at a time of increased social inequities and expansion of social media use among youth. With a more globalized and technology-oriented environment, distal comparisons made on social networks may be changing the dynamics of social comparison (Wolff et al. 2010).

Practical applications of these findings involve the need to raise awareness about the healthy use of social media, about the effects of social comparisons on mood and behaviors, and about the benefits of managing feelings by changing the point of reference of comparison or focusing on being grateful (Nicuță and Constantin 2021). With that purpose, social media literacy interventions in schools and interventions in the clinical setting may be beneficial for adolescents. Consideration should also be given to the inclusion of measures of social status, social comparison, and social inclusion when assessing the health of adolescents. Strategies used by emotionally mature individuals (Urry and Gross 2010) could be taught in therapeutic settings or school counseling services to help navigate new and complex social contexts (Steers et al. 2014; Twenge et al. 2018). The goal of these strategies should not be to acquiesce to societal inequalities but to help manage emotions that can affect functioning. Evident in the statements made by adolescents interviewed, the developmentally appropriate early teen focus on celebrities (Raviv et al. 1996), may have morphed and become more intense with the constant access to social media celebrities through smart phones. Understanding these changes can provide policymakers with tools to ensure that benign practices are used when designing social media sites.

This study has several limitations. These findings are subjective and intersubjective in that they required our reading of meanings and the interactions with the adolescents. This qualitative method is more appropriate for studying this particular subject matter but it does not work for causal relationships. We do not seek to generalize our findings as one would in a controlled study but would expect research in local communities would yield some commonalities. The questions we asked in the interviews changed as our understanding of the topic evolved. Although our initial intent was to focus our interviews on wealth and relative financial deprivation, the adolescents interviewed tended to quickly discuss other aspects of social status, such as popularity, appearance, and grades. Future studies should continue to consider these broader dimensions when examining the association between social comparisons and depression in adolescents.

In brief, our interest with this study was to provide examples and descriptions that would reflect the intersection of distress in adolescents with their social status and the social comparisons they made. We hoped that the qualitative study could give insight into the perception of social status in a changing society where inequalities are more present and easily noticed with social media. Today’s adolescents navigate broad and fluid social contexts where there is a constant gauging of what is accepted and where they lie in the social status hierarchy. The exposure to these complex contexts has increased with the use of smartphones and may have effects in the social and emotional developmental stage of adolescence. Addressing social status in health care and educational centers may be beneficial to adolescents at an important life stage of identity formation. More research on social comparisons in adolescents in the context of new medias and growing inequalities is needed to understand how to best support adolescents to adapt to this changing environment and to buffer the effects of social status differences on their well-being.

Biographies

Carol Vidal, MD, PhD, is an assistant professor in the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Her research focuses on the intersection between social factors and interventions and adolescent mental health.

Lawrence S. Wissow, MD, MPH, is the Raisbeck professor of psychiatry and director of the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, at the University of Washington. His primary area of research involves the incorporation of mental health into primary care.