Adolescent Mental Health in the Digital Age: Facts, Fears and Future Directions
By CandiceL. Odgers, Michaeline R Jensen. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry and Allied Disciplines, 2020
889 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Adolescents are spending an increasing amount of their time online and connected to each other via digital technologies. Mobile device ownership and social media usage have reached unprecedented levels, and concerns have been raised that this constant connectivity is harming adolescents’ mental health. This review synthesized data from three sources: (a) narrative reviews and meta-analyses conducted between 2014 and 2019, (b) large-scale preregistered cohort studies and (c) intensive longitudinal and ecological momentary assessment studies, to summarize what is known about linkages between digital technology usage and adolescent mental health, with a specific focus on depression and anxiety. The review highlights that most research to date has been correlational, focused on adults versus adolescents, and has generated a mix of often conflicting small positive, negative and null associations. The most recent and rigorous large-scale preregistered studies report small associations between the amount of daily digital technology usage and adolescents’ well-being that do not offer a way of distinguishing cause from effect and, as estimated, are unlikely to be of clinical or practical significance. Implications for improving future research and for supporting adolescents’ mental health in the digital age are discussed.
Subfields: Applied Psychology, Education, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/be7e27521d0edc1c40664eddbc870ed87f47b458
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Applied Psychology
In Education
In Sociology and Political Science
Citations in the corpus
- The effects of social deprivation on adolescent development and mental health (2020, neutral): “Furthermore, there is growing consensus that the consequences of social media use will be dependent on individual differences( 79 ).”
- Ethics of the Attention Economy: The Problem of Social Media Addiction (2020, background): “Recent critical reviews of the research on social media have, in fact, pointed out that the correlational studies do not adequately distinguish cause from effect (Odgers & Jensen, 2020; Orben & Przybylski, 2019).”