It is essential to comprehend the thoughts of teenagers in order to make specific policy recommendations.
The CEO of Facebook’s parent company Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, testified in front of Congress in January to address concerns over the possible negative effects of social media on minors. “The existing body of scientific work has not shown a causal link between using social media and young people having worse mental health,” stated Zuckerberg in her opening statement.
However, a lot of social scientists would contest that assertion. Studies have begun to demonstrate a causal relationship in recent years between adolescent social media use and decreased wellbeing or mood disorders, primarily anxiety and depression.
Strangely, one of the studies on this link that was most frequently quoted was about Facebook.
Researchers investigated whether the platform’s widespread adoption on college campuses in the middle of the 2000s worsened symptoms of anxiety and sadness. According to MIT economist Alexey Makarin, who coauthored the study that was published in the American Economic Review in November 2022, the answer was unambiguously yes. “To say there is no causal evidence that social media causes mental health issues, to that I definitely object,” says Makarin, “but there is still a lot to be explored.”
Statistics indicating that youths between the ages of 13 and 17 use social media nearly exclusively are the source of both the studies and the cause for alarm. According to a 2022 survey, two-thirds of teenagers say they use TikTok, and over 60% say they use Instagram or Snapchat. (Only 30% of respondents claimed to use Facebook.) According to another survey, girls spend an average of 3.4 hours a day on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, while guys spend about 2.1 hours on these platforms. Simultaneously, there is a greater than ever prevalence of depression among teenagers, particularly among girls (SN: 6/30/23).
Some scholars are beginning to focus on potential explanations as additional study demonstrates a strong correlation between these events. Why does using social media appear to be a trigger for mental health issues? Why do some groups—like girls or young adults—feel those effects more than others? Is it possible to separate the benefits of social media from its drawbacks in order to give teenagers, their parents, and legislators more focused advice?
“If you don’t know why things are happening, you can’t design good public policy,” states economist Scott Cunningham of Baylor University in Waco, Texas.
Getting more rigorous
There is a vast amount of scholarly research available as a result of years of circulating concerns about the effects of children’s social media use. However, the majority of those correlational research were unable to determine whether teenage social media use was bad for mental health or whether teens who had mental health issues used social media more frequently.
Furthermore, the results of these investigations were frequently unclear or the impacts on mental health were negligible. Psychologists Amy Orben and Andrew Przybylski merged data from three surveys to see if they could uncover a connection between using technology, especially social media, and worse well-being. Their work attracted a lot of media interest. The two focused their questionnaires on sadness, suicidal thoughts, and self-esteem in order to assess the mental health of more than 355,000 adolescents.
According to a 2019 Nature Human Behaviour study by Orben, who is currently at the University of Cambridge, and Przybylski, who is at the University of Oxford, using digital technology was linked to a minor decline in teenage well-being. However, the pair played down that result, pointing out that similar declines in teenage wellbeing have been linked to eating potatoes, drinking milk and attending films.
More recent, comprehensive research have started to show holes in that story.
Researchers, including Orben and Przybylski, examined how respondents’ answers to a question measuring life happiness varied between 2011 and 2018 using survey data on social media use and wellbeing from over 17,400 youths and young adults. They also investigated the differences in answers based on age, gender, and amount of time spent on social media.
According to a 2022 study published in Nature Communications, kids who use social media during specific developmental stages—most notably puberty and young adulthood—have lower levels of wellbeing. This resulted in worse well-being scores for girls and boys between the ages of 11 and 13. Around the age of 19, both groups also noted a decline in wellbeing. Furthermore, the researchers discovered evidence supporting the Goldilocks Hypothesis, which postulates that excessive or insufficient use of social media can have negative effects on mental health, among older teenagers.
If you consider everyone at once, very nothing happens. However, L.J. Shrum, a consumer psychologist at HEC Paris who was not involved in this research, notes that “you get these definite impacts if you look at specific age groups, at specifically what [Orben] calls “windows of sensitivity.” He will soon publish a review of research in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research on the relationship between teen social media use and mental health.
Reason and consequence
Researchers claim that the long-term investigation suggests a causal relationship. However, natural or quasi-experimental methods are among the most transparent ways to determine cause and effect. Researchers need to find circumstances in which the implementation of a societal “treatment” is spaced and time-staggered for these in-the-wild trials. Subsequently, they can contrast the results between the individuals in the therapy group and the control group, which consists of those who are still waiting.
That was the methodology employed by Makarin and colleagues in their Facebook investigation. The researchers focused on Facebook’s phased deployment on 775 college campuses between 2004 and 2006. They merged the rollout data with student answers to the National College Health Assessment, a popular evaluation of the physical and mental well-being of college students.
The next step for the team was to determine whether the survey questions had identified any diagnosable mental health issues. In particular, they asked over 500 undergraduate students to complete validated depression and anxiety screening tests as well as the National College Health Assessment. They discovered that screening results were predicted by mental health evaluation 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.
The study discovered that college campuses with Facebook had a 2 percentage point higher proportion of students who satisfied the diagnostic criteria for anxiety or depression when compared to campuses without Facebook.
Cunningham, who was not involved in the research, states that “that study really is the crown jewel right now” when it comes to demonstrating a causal link between teen use of social media and bad mental health.
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 sites like Snapchat, Instagram, and TikTok have since imitated and expanded upon Facebook’s current optimisation for maximum addiction. In addition to social media’s widespread use, there may be other detrimental consequences on mental health nowadays.
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 worry about our children, who are in high school 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 goes on for a short while, as Orben and Przybylski’s 2022 research revealed.
According to Cunningham, further research is needed to determine the reasons and conditions under 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. Nothing truly can be asked of these kinds of papers, according to Cunningham, “to find these plausible mechanisms.”
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 effects of students attending schools with mobile phone bans to those attending schools without one. In the July issue of BMJ Open, the researchers detailed the methodology for their study involving over 1,000 kids 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 throughout 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 approach to understand the mechanisms by which social media influences well-being is to have conversations with kids and those in their social circles. But it takes time and work to go from massive data to this more individualised approach. According to her, social media “has increased in pace and momentum very, very quickly.” “And it takes a long time for research to keep up with that process.”