Latest research points to the impact of social media on teens' mental health
In January, Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, testified before Congress to address concerns about the potential adverse effects of social media on children. Zuckerberg’s opening statement claimed: ‘The existing body of scientific work has not demonstrated a causal link between social media usage and worsened mental health among young people.’ However, many social scientists would challenge this assertion.
The statement is, however, not agreed upon by all social scientists. Social media use among teenage people and mental health issues, particularly anxiety and depression, have been linked by recent research.
The studies and the cause for concern stem from data showing how commonplace social media use is among teenagers between the ages of 13 and 17. According to a 2022 survey, roughly 60% of teens use Instagram or Snapchat, and two thirds use TikTok. Facebook is used by only 30% of respondents. According to another survey, girls spend 3.4 hours a day on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, while boys spend 2.1 hours. Similarly, teenagers are displaying higher levels of depression than ever, particularly female teenagers (SN:6/30/23).
Since there is a strong correlation between these phenomena, some researchers are concentrating on possible mechanisms. Why does social media use appear to be associated with mental health issues? Why are these effects more noticeable to some groups than to others, such as girls and young adults? Is it possible to differentiate between the pros and cons of social media in order to provide more targeted guidance to legislators, parents, and teenagers?
“You can’t design good public policy if you don’t know why things are happening,” said Scott Cunningham, an economist at Baylor University in Waco, Texas.
Reason and consequence
The longitudinal study suggests causation, according to researchers. However, natural or quasi-experiments are one of the most effective ways to determine cause and effect. For these in-the-wild experiments, researchers must identify scenarios in which the implementation of a societal “treatment” is staggered in terms of space and time. They can then compare the outcomes of those who received the treatment to those who remain in the queue — the control group. Makarin and his team took this approach when studying Facebook. The researchers focused on Facebook’s staggered rollout across 775 college campuses between 2004 and 2006. A widely used survey of college students’ mental and physical health, the National College Health Assessment, was combined with the rollout data. The next step for the team was to determine whether the survey questions had identified any diagnosable mental health issues. In particular, they asked about 500 undergraduate students to complete validated depression and anxiety screening tools as well as the National College Health Assessment. They discovered that screening results were predicted by mental health assessment scores. This implied that a decline in the college survey’s measure of well-being was a reliable indicator of a rise in diagnosable mental health conditions. Comparing campuses with and without Facebook, the team found an increase of 2 percentage points in anxiety or depression treatment.
A requirement for subtlety
The social media environment of today is very different from that of two decades ago. According to Shrum, other more recent platforms like Snapchat, Instagram, and TikTok have since imitated and expanded upon Facebook’s current optimization for maximum addiction. In addition to social media’s widespread use, there may be more detrimental effects on mental health today.
Furthermore, studies on social media typically concentrate on young adults because they are a simpler demographic to research than minors. According to Cunningham, that has to alter. “Most of us are worried about our high school kids and younger.”
Researchers must adjust their approach accordingly. Importantly, it is no longer valid to compare social media users and nonusers in a straightforward manner. A teenager who abstains from social media use may feel worse than one who logs on for a short while, as Orben and Przybylski’s 2022 research revealed.
According to Cunningham, more research is needed to determine the reasons and conditions in which using social media can be detrimental to mental health. This link has many explanations. Social media, for example, is said to stifle other interests or make it more likely for users to compare themselves negatively to others. However, big data studies are unable to answer those more profound issues because they rely on pre-existing surveys and statistical analysis “These kinds of papers, there’s nothing you can really ask … to find these plausible mechanisms,” Cunningham says.
An ongoing initiative from the University of Birmingham in England called SMART Schools aims to comprehend social media use from a more nuanced perspective. Victoria Goodyear, a pedagogical expert, and her colleagues are comparing the physical and mental health outcomes of students attending schools with cell phone bans to students attending schools without one. In the July issue of BMJ Open, the researchers detailed the methodology for their study involving over 1,000 students and 30 schools.
Additionally, Goodyear and associates are integrating qualitative research with that natural experiment. They convened 36 focus groups of five people each, made up of all the teachers, parents, and students from six of those schools. The team’s goals are to find out how students use their phones during the school day, how usage habits affect students’ emotions, and what the various stakeholders believe about cell phone use bans. For better or worse, according to Goodyear, the best way to understand the mechanisms by which social media influences well-being is to have conversations with teens and those in their social circles. But it takes time and work to go from big data to this more individualized approach. “Social media has increased in pace and momentum very, very quickly,” she says. “And research takes a long time to catch up with that process.” But until that happens, scientists are unable to offer much guidance. “What guidance could we provide to young people, parents and schools to help maintain the positives of social media use?” Goodyear asks. “There’s not concrete evidence yet.”
References
E. Fumagalli, L.J. Shrum and T.M. Lowrey. The effects of social media consumption on adolescent psychological well-being. Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, in press, 2024. doi: 10.1086/728739.
G. Wood et al. Smartphones, social Media and Adolescent mental well-being: the impact of school policies Restricting dayTime use — protocol for a natural experimental observational study using mixed methods at secondary schools in England (SMART Schools Study). BMJ Open. Vol. 13, July 2023, e075832. doi: 10.1136/ bmjopen-2023-075832.A. Orben et al. Windows of developmental sensitivity to social media. Nature Communications. Published online March 28, 2022. doi: 10.1038/s41467-022-29296-3.
A. Orben and A.K. Przybylski. The association between adolescent well-being and digital technology use. Nature Human Behaviour. Vol. 3, February 2019, p. 173. doi: 10.1038/s41562-018-0506-1.