Computer-Mediated Communication, Social Media, and Mental Health: A Conceptual and Empirical Meta-Review

By Adrian Meier, Leonard Reinecke. Communication Research, 2020

411 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Computer-mediated communication (CMC), and specifically social media, may affect the mental health (MH) and well-being of its users, for better or worse. Research on this topic has accumulated rapidly, accompanied by controversial public debate and numerous systematic reviews and meta-analyses. Yet, a higher-level integration of the multiple disparate conceptual and operational approaches to CMC and MH and individual review findings is desperately needed. To this end, we first develop two organizing frameworks that systematize conceptual and operational approaches to CMC and MH. Based on these frameworks, we integrate the literature through a meta-review of 34 reviews and a content analysis of 594 publications. Meta-analytic evidence, overall, suggests a small negative association between social media use and MH. However, effects are complex and depend on the CMC and MH indicators investigated. Based on our conceptual review and the evidence synthesis, we devise an agenda for future research in this interdisciplinary field.

Subfields: Applied Psychology, Literature and Literary Theory, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5fed8d37aa1b0367c646615098b9f39b43727edb

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In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

A systematic review and meta-analysis of discrepancies between logged and self-reported digital media use (2021, background): “…on media uses and effects to move on from “the repetitive development of self-report assess-ments” 21 , as Kaye et al. 95 , Meier and Reinecke 96 , Ernala et al. 46 and Büchi 97 discuss, there is a need for a paradigm shift in which specific affordances, behaviours and digital practices…”
Social Media Use and Adolescents’ Well-Being: Developing a Typology of Person-Specific Effect Patterns (2020, neutral): “A recent meta-review on the effects of social media on well-being indicates that an effect size of β = .05 reflects the effect sizes reported in the literature (Meier & Reinecke, 2020).”