The Longitudinal Association Between Social-Media Use and Depressive Symptoms Among Adolescents and Young Adults: An Empirical Reply to Twenge et al. (2018)
By T. Heffer, Marie Good, O. Daly, Elliott T MacDonell, Teena Willoughby. Clinical psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, 2019
230 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Research by Twenge, Joiner, Rogers, and Martin has indicated that there may be an association between social-media use and depressive symptoms among adolescents. However, because of the cross-sectional nature of this work, the relationship among these variables over time remains unclear. Thus, in this longitudinal study we examined the associations between social-media use and depressive symptoms over time using two samples: 594 adolescents (Mage = 12.21) who were surveyed annually for 2 years, and 1,132 undergraduate students (Mage = 19.06) who were surveyed annually for 6 years. Results indicate that among both samples, social-media use did not predict depressive symptoms over time for males or females. However, greater depressive symptoms predicted more frequent social-media use only among adolescent girls. Thus, while it is often assumed that social-media use may lead to depressive symptoms, our results indicate that this assumption may be unwarranted.
Subfields: Communication, Education, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c33e3feef5458139d111c17ed45262b36371198e
How researchers see this paper
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In Communication
- Hiromitsu Morita
- Chong Xing
- Rebecca M. Johnson
- Jeffrey A. Hall
- Isabela Granic
- H. Scholten
- Elaina M. Ross
In Education
In Sociology and Political Science
- Hiromitsu Morita
- Chong Xing
- Rebecca M. Johnson
- Jeffrey A. Hall
- Isabela Granic
- H. Scholten
- Elaina M. Ross
Citations in the corpus
- Beyond Screen Time: Identity Development in the Digital Age (2020, background): “…mental health and screen use and that these effects are often bidirectional (Berryman et al., 2018; Elhai et al., 2018; Ferguson & Wang, 2019; Heffer et al., 2019; Hilgard, Engelhardt, & Rouder, 2017; Jensen et al., 2019; Markey & Ferguson, 2017; Orben & Przybylski, 2019a, 2019b; Orben et…”
- Experimentally manipulating social media abstinence: results of a four-week diary study (2019, background): “Song et al. (2014) and Heffer et al. (2019) suggests that the causal direction of social media use is far from a resolved issue.”