However, research that looked for a direct link between social media and well being has not yielded much.
“There’s been absolutely hundreds of these studies, almost all showing pretty small effects,” said Jeff Hancock, a behavioral psychologist at Stanford University who has conducted a meta-analysis of 226 such studies.
The scope of the new study is what is most notable, according to Dr. Hancock. It included two surveys in Britain that surveyed 84,000 people. One of those surveys tracked more than 17,000 teens aged 10-21 over time. It revealed how their life-satisfaction and social media consumption changed from one year on.
“Just in terms of scale, it’s fantastic,” Dr. Hancock said. He added that the rich age-based analysis is a major improvement on previous studies, which had tended not to lump all adolescents in one place. “The adolescent years are not like some constant period of developmental life — they bring rapid changes,” he said.
Study found that early adolescence saw a lot of social media use, which was associated with lower life satisfaction ratings one year later. This sensitive period for girls was between the ages of 11 and 13 years, while it was 14 and 15 years for boys. Dr. Orben suggested that this sex difference could be explained by the fact that boys tend to reach puberty earlier in girls.
“We know that adolescent girls go through a lot of development earlier than boys do,” Dr. Orben said. “There are a lot of things that could be potential drivers, whether they’re social, cognitive or biological.”
Both the boys as well as the girls in the study experienced a second period with social media sensitivity at age 19. “That was quite surprising because it was so consistent across the sexes,” Dr. Orben said. Around that age, she said, many people go through major social upheaval — like starting college, working in a new job or living independently for the first time — that might change the way they interact with social media, she said.
Source: NY Times
