Beyond Words: Latent Profiles of Online Communication Styles and Their Association with Social Well-Being on Social Media

This study investigates the relationship between online communication styles and social well-being on social media. Drawing on data from 599 participants in the United Kingdom and Arab Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, we employed Latent Profile Analysis (LPA) to identify communication style profiles based on self-reported use across eight digital communication dimensions: ordered vs. unordered, direct vs. indirect, literate vs. oral, and being-centered vs. doing-centered. In both samples, two distinct profiles emerged: a lower engagement group and a higher engagement group, consistently and proportionally across the various communication styles. In the UK sample, individuals in the higher engagement profile marked by expressive and multi-modal communication, reported significantly greater social well-being on social media across four of five well-being domains: integration, contribution, actualization, and coherence. In contrast, no significant differences in social well-being on social media were observed across profiles in the Arab sample. A significant interaction between culture and communication profile confirmed that the relationship between communication style and social well-being on social media is moderated by cultural context. In addition, the results challenge the expectation that people can be profiled into distinct sets of communication styles, such as being high in one set of styles, e.g. direct and literate, and low in the opposite set, e.g. indirect and oral. Instead, people were profiled as generally high or low across all communication styles, though with varying levels within each. The results also challenge the assumption that active social media engagement universally enhances social well-being.