Six Questions Could Test For Social Media Addiction
Six simple screening questions can test for social media addiction, according to James Roberts, PhD, a marketing professor at Baylor Universitys Hankamer School of Business. Roberts researches smartphone addiction and wrote the book Too Much of a Good Thing: Are You Addicted to Your Smartphone?
A recent poll from Common Sense Media shows about half of all teens feel they are addicted to their smartphones, and at least 59% of parents believe their kids are addicted. Nearly two-thirds of parents say their teenagers spend too much time using mobile devices, and 52% of teens feel the same way.
The University Of Pennsylvania Study
In 2018, the University of Pennsylvania hosted the most impactful research into the nexus between social media and depression. The study involved splitting a group of 143 students into two groups for three weeks. One group continued normal social network activities. The second limited their access to social media to just 30 minutes a day .
Everyone involved used iPhones. Researchers tracked phone usage data to ensure each group participated as planned. In just three weeks, the group that used less social media had better mental health outcomes. As such, the research study suggests that less time on social media led to fewer feelings of unhappiness and depression.
Social Aspects Of Sm Use
Several studies looked at the social aspects of engagement with SM, either by evaluating the effects of cybervictimization on depression, parental involvement both through monitoring of SM use or direct engagement with the adolescent , and aspects of social support received by the adolescent within and outside of SNS .
Cyberbullying/cybervictimization
Four studies examined cyberbullying via SM and depressive symptoms. found that symptoms of depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and suicidal ideation were more prevalent among participants who reported any past-year cyberbullying . After adjusting for a range of demographic factors, only lesbian, gay, and bisexual status correlated with cyberbullying involvement or adverse mental health outcomes. Another study found that cyberbullying victimization fully mediated the association between SM use and psychological distress and suicide attempts . Furthermore, a 12-month longitudinal study found that cybervictimization predicted later depressive symptoms . Depressive symptoms have also been shown to be a risk factor for cybervictimization on Facebook , showing evidence of the bi-directionality of this association.
Social support
Parental involvement/parental monitoring
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Title And Abstract Relevance Screening
The search yielded 728 articles of which six duplicates were removed. One author screened the remainder of the articles by title and abstract and a second author reviewed every 25th article for agreement. All authors screened full-text articles and extracted data from those that met the inclusion criteria. The authors met over the course of the full-text review process to resolve conflicts and maintain consistency among the authors themselves and with the research question. Of the total number of studies included for full-text review, 505 articles were excluded. Out of the 223 full-text studies assessed for eligibility, 175 were excluded. A total of 42 articles were eligible for review . A form was developed to extract the characteristics of each study that included author and year of publication, objectives of the study, study method, country where the study was conducted, depression scale used, number of participants, participant age, and results .
PRISMA flow chart of data selection process.
Ethics Approval And Consent To Participate
All the described procedures were approved by the Research Ethics Committee of Lund University and were in accordance with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.
The respondents filled in a questionnaire sent to their home address by regular mail, which they also sent back by regular mail. In the beginning of the questionnaire, information regarding the study was given concerning the purpose, data security and that participation was voluntary. It was also informed that sending back a completed questionnaire was considered to be consent to participate.
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Are You Addicted To Social Media
According to Roberts, social media addiction shares six key features with other behavioral addictions: building tolerance for the stimulus, symptoms of withdrawal, conflict about the source of the addiction, high salience of the addictive behavior, a sense of euphoria when indulging the addiction, and vulnerability to relapse.
Roberts suggests six questions can uncover these features and identify social media addiction. Those questions are:
Answering in the affirmative to three or more questions points toward a social media addiction.
Using Lots Of Social Media Sites Raises Depression Risk
A national survey by Pitt’s Center for Research on Media, Technology and Health found that use of multiple social media platforms is more strongly associated with depression and anxiety among young adults than the total amount of time they spend on social media.
The analysis, published online and scheduled for the April print issue of the journal Computers in Human Behavior, showed that people who report using seven to 11 social media platforms had more than three times the risk of depression and anxiety than their peers who use no more than two platforms, even after adjusting for the total time spent on social media overall.
This association is strong enough that clinicians could consider asking their patients with depression and anxiety about multiple platform use and counseling them that this use may be related to their symptoms, said lead author Brian A. Primack, MD, PhD, assistant vice chancellor for health and society in Pitts Schools of the Health Sciences and the center’s director. While we cant tell from this study whether depressed and anxious people seek out multiple platforms or whether something about using multiple platforms can lead to depression and anxiety, in either case the results are potentially valuable.
Primack, who also is a professor of medicine at Pitt, emphasized that the directionality of the association is unclear.
Primack and his team propose several hypotheses as to why multi-platform social media use may drive depression and anxiety:
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Recent Survey Links Social Media Risk Of Depression
A person interacts on a cell phone.
A Snapchat users open the app on a smart phone.
A person scrolls through an Instagram feed on a smart phone.
LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Social media and depression are connected, according to recent studies, and one local doctors said it comes partly from posts of seemingly perfect lives.
“We see an artificial reality in them,” said Dr. Stephen Taylor, chief medical officer of UofL Health Peace Hospital. “It looks so different from what we experience personally, because our own lives are not that clean. Nobody’s life is that clean, but it looks that way in the social media view.”
A recent study surveyed around 5,400 adults, and their risk of depression rose after using Snapchat, Facebook and TikTok, three popular social media sites.
Doctors said social media should not be used as a replacement for in-person interaction. They also recommend logging off for an extended period of time can help.
New Research Links Social Media Use To Depression In Older Adults
A new study has linked social media use with symptoms of depression among older adults, joining other research showing increased mental health issues among younger adults and adolescents using social media.
The study, , surveyed 5,395 adults with a mean age of 56 between May 2020 and May 2021. The researchers asked respondents to fill out a mental health questionnaire and report what social media sites they use: Snapchat, LinkedIn, TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram or Youtube.
After adjusting for other factors, including participants’ living situations, the pandemic and news consumption, researchers found that social media’s effects on mental health “are not limited to young adults.”
The study also showed that Snapchat, Facebook and TikTok were most frequently associated with reports of increased depressive symptoms in adults.
The research does not directly prove social media causes depression among adults because of some limitations, including an inability to measure the nature of social media use among survey respondents. People already vulnerable to depression may also be more likely to log on to social media. The researchers said their data means more research on the topic needs to be completed.
Nearly 1 in 5 U.S. adults live with a mental illness, according to the National Institute of Mental Health, representing 20 percent of the adult population.
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Depression Survey Questions For A Questionnaire
Heres how to create a good survey design for a depression questionnaire using appropriate survey questions.
Depression survey questions to evaluate mental health and identify the level of depression.
Please state to your level of agreement, for the following things that have been observed in the last week
Does Social Media Cause Depression
Social media applications such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, and more have become an icon of modern times alongside the internet itself, Facebook being the largest social media platform in the world with nearly a third of the worlds population having profiles on the website. As the popularity of the internet grew, depression and mood disorders among adolescents have steadily risen, becoming the most lethal affliction to young people in the developed world. Research on social media use has concluded over and over again that as social media use rises, so does the number of cases of depression and mood disorders. The correlation is clear, however the unanswered question remains: Why?
Does excessive social media use cause depression, or do depressed people tend to use social media excessively? In order to attempt to answer these questions, we must look at how social media applications hijack human psychology.
References:
Darmoc, S., . Marketing addiction: the dark side of gaming and social media. Journal of Psychosocial Nursing and Mental Health Services.56, 4:2 https://doi-org.ezproxy.ycp.edu:8443/10.3928/02793695-20180320-01
Ferrara, E., Yang, Z. . Measuring Emotional Contagion in Social Media. PLoS ONE, 10, 1-14.
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Research Question B Pes And Mental Health
This section builds on the first research question by aiming to detect how PES moderates the effect of frequency of SNS use and the number of SNS contacts regarding mental health. Provided the non-existing bivariate association in males, the subsequent analysis was not included for them.
Table shows that among those who reported being active on SNS almost every hour, the effect on mental health was highest for those who simultaneously reported low PES, OR 3.12 . However, the evidence for significant effect modification between the mentioned exposure variables was weak, SI=1.25.
Table 2 Synergistic interaction effects between SNS use frequency and PES on poor mental health among females
Safely Using Social Media
Using social media comes with mental health risks, but that doesnt mean it should be completely avoided. Experts recommend using these networking websites in moderation.
Set a timer when youre on social media or install an app on your phone or computer that tracks how long youve spent on a networking site.
Without these timers or apps, its easy to spend hours on social media before you know it. To limit your time on social media, you can also plan real-world activities that help you focus on your immediate surroundings and circumstances. Read a book, watch a movie, go for a stroll, play a game, bake some bread, or have a phone conversation with a friend. Make the time to enjoy life offline.
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Disclosure Of Mental Health Symptoms On Sm
A few of the studies selected focussed on studying the disclosure of depressive symptoms on SM and explored the potential of disclosure of symptoms of distress on SM to predict depression and suicide, in addition to the phenomenon of suicide contagion.
Online disclosure and prediction of mental health symptoms
Although content analysis is a method theorized to have potential to predict and prevent non-suicidal and suicidal self-injurious behaviours, the data are mixed. examined the predictive validity of explicit references to personal distress in adolescentsâ Facebook postings, comparing these postings with external, self-report measures of psychological distress and found that most depressed adolescents did not publish explicit references to depression. Additionally, adolescents published less verbal content than adult users of SNS. Conversely, found that while disclosures of depressed mood were frequent among both depressed and non-depressed adolescents, those who were depressed shared more negative feelings, anhedonia, and suicidal thoughts on SM than those who were not depressed.
Suicide contagion effect
Snapchat Tiktok And Facebook Most Likely Associated With Depression
Daily Mail reported that Harvard researchers conducted the surveys in two separate periods, wherein they first asked the respondents to fill in the mental health questionnaire in May 2020 and asked them again a year later.
Researchers said that one year after the first time respondents answered the questionnaire showed that 482 of them showed clinically significant deterioration in their mental health in which scored higher for possible signs of depression.
In their study, titled “Association Between Social Media Use and Self-reported Symptoms of Depression in US Adults” published in the medical journal JAMA Network Open, researchers concluded that using Snapchat, Facebook, and TikTok were more likely to report feeling depressed compared to those who did not use a photo-sharing social media platform.
The lead author of the study, Professor Roy Perlis, told NBC News that older TikTok users are more than 1.5 times more likely to feel low compared to their peers, and those who use Snapchat scored higher on symptoms of depression a year later when they filled out the survey.
On the other hand, it is opposite to those who use Facebook whose users were people younger than 35 years old report more than 2.5 times more likely to feel depressed.
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Why Conduct Social Media Surveys
Social media platforms are extremely conducive and rich-data contexts for market research. By tracking social media interactions across different channels, you can discover the preferences and interests of your target audience, and also leverage this information to create user-centered campaigns.
Social media surveys help you to identify trending issues and hot topics that your target audience is interested in. In fact, there are a variety of different methods, tools, and tips you can use to uncover market insights and consumer behavior on social media.
Monitoring and searching hashtags related to your industry, product, or brand is a good way to discover what your target audience is talking about at a particular point in time. Social media survey is also a valuable tool for real-time and allows you to drive user engagement and interactions that translate to accurate data for market research.
- Monitoring Societal Issues
Social media surveys also help you to carry out social listening on trending issues. For example, you can post a short survey on your Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter pages to find out what your online community thinks about a trending social issue.
- Track Harassment and Bullying
With increased social media activity and interactions, cyberbullying is now on the rise. One way to track and address this is to conduct smart social media surveys that allow people to share their experiences with bullying and targeted harassment online.
The Link Between Online Social Media And Networking Sites And Depression
The above research demonstrates correlations between depression diagnoses and the social media experience. However, the important question is whether social media actually causes depression? Is it possible that an otherwise mentally healthy person can develop depression symptoms following high social media use? Unfortunately, pinpointing the direct cause of depression in adolescents and younger adults has proven difficult.
If social media can cause depression, then the U.S. should have experienced higher levels of mental illness as social-media and smartphone use increased. In fact, a new research review by Abi-Jaoude et al. finds a number of troubling links over the past two decades. For example, social media can alter adolescents body image and social relationships. The effects of social media are especially pronounced in teenage girls. Online experiences like cyberbullying and the normalization of dangerous behaviors can further contribute to social isolation and negative emotions.
Sleep deprivation is another lifestyle issue that can be exacerbated by heavy social media use. A recent study published in BMJ Journals found that more than a third of the study participants spent greater than 3 hours a day on social media, and over a fifth used social media for at least five hours daily. Most importantly, these same users were more likely to report going to sleep later, waking up later, and being unable to return to sleep after a nighttime awakening.
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