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Digital well-being concerns individuals' subjective well-being in a social environment where digital media are omnipresent. A general framework is developed to integrate empirical research toward a cumulative science of the impacts of digital media use on well-being. It describes the nature of and connections between three pivotal constructs: digital practices, harms/benefits, and well-being. Individual's digital practices arise within and shape socio-technical structural conditions, and lead to often concomitant harms and benefits. These pathways are theoretically plausible causal chains that lead from a specific manifestation of digital practice to an individual well-being-related outcome with some regularity. Future digital well-being studies should prioritize descriptive validity and formal theory development.

Testing communication theories requires a valid empirical basis, yet especially for usage time measures, retrospective self-reports have shown to be biased. This study draws on a unique data set of 923 Swiss internet users who had their internet use tracked for at least 30 days on mobile and desktop devices and took part in a survey covering internet usage as well as person-level background variables. The analysis focuses on active usage time overall and on the major services Google Search, YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, and the online newspaper 20 Minuten. The results showed that overall internet usage time was lower for older and higher-educated users based on both the tracking and survey data, and the reported usage time was consistently higher than the tracked usage time. The tracking data further revealed that internet users in all social groups spent the majority of their time online on a mobile device. The number of users of the major services varied mainly between age groups. These differences were less pronounced when it came to the time users spent engaging with these services. Over the course of a day, the major services varied in their frequency of use: for example, messaging peaked before noon and in the late afternoon, whereas online news use was comparably constant at a lower level.

Based on representative surveys on Internet use, this article advances comparative research on the second-level digital divide by modeling Internet usage disparities for five countries with narrowing access gaps. Four core Internet usage types are constructed and predicted by sociodemographic variables in a structural model. Overall, the findings confirm the recently identified shift in the digital divide from access to usage in five further countries. Results show that sociodemographics alone account for up to half of the variance in usage in these high-penetration countries, with age being the strongest predictor. Measurement invariance tests indicate that a direct comparison is only valid between three of the five countries explored. Methodologically, this points to the indispensability of such tests for unbiased comparative research.

With the permeation of digital media into all spheres of life, individual-level efforts to manage information abundance and constant availability have become more common. To date, information on the prevalence of the motivations and strategies for such disconnection practices and how different sociodemographic groups experience digital disconnection is scarce. We surveyed a national sample of 1163 Swiss Internet users in November 2020. Thematic coding of open-text responses demonstrated people's understandings of "balanced digital media use" as primarily concerned with subjectively appropriate amounts of use, purposeful use, social connections, non-addiction, and time for "real life." Through principal components analysis, we provide a classification of the types of motivations people have for disconnecting and strategies people use to disconnect. Persistent age differences suggest that life-span approaches to studying digital disconnection are imperative. We formulate implications for disconnection research in the context of digital inequality and provide an outlook for evolving digital habits in future digital societies.