A typology of adolescents’ technology use before and during the COVID-19 pandemic: A latent profile analysis

The COVID-19 pandemic has made adolescents´ technology use unavoidable for sustaining teaching and learning processes. In the present paper we conducted two studies using a person-centered latent profile analysis to examine adolescents’ technology use before (Study 1, N = 643) and during (Study 2, N = 644) the COVID-19 pandemic in the region of Bavaria, Germany. While adolescents’ technology use before the COVID-19 pandemic was divergent in terms of study-related and social technology use, the results show that during the COVID-19 pandemic, adolescents’ technology use increased in terms of both, study-related and social purposes. Although our results suggest that adolescents’ use of technology for study-related purposes increased during the COVID-19 pandemic, adolescents from educationally disadvantaged families still appear to be at risk of being left behind by the even more rapid digitization of the COVID-19 pandemic, for which we discuss future research and targeted interventions.