Active and Passive Social Media Use and Mental Health Outcomes
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Authors
Burns, Thomas
Issue Date
2024-04-04
Type
Language
Keywords
Alternative Title
Abstract
Active and passive social media use and how it affects college-aged young adult’s mental health outcomes. The relationship between active social media use (talking and interacting with others) and passive social media usage (scrolling, viewing other’s pages, etc.) and their potential relationship with mental health outcomes like depressive or anxiety symptoms. According to Twenge et al., (2018) adolescents are spending twice as much time on social media in 2016 as they were in 2006. In the same population, between 2007 and 2018 rates of anxiety, self-injury, and suicidal ideation have increased significantly (Duffy et al., 2019). This trend plays itself out in the rate of suicide that was 30% higher in 2020 than it was in 2000 overall, and youth suicide has increased 56% from 2007 to 2017 (Wallace, 2022). While there is a breadth of literature examining possible relationships between social media, this study will expand on specific parts of literature that examine not only the quantity of social media usage but the way it is used. The study's objective is to examine the relationship between active and passive use of social media (direct exchanges and posting compared to monitoring content passively) and anxiety and depression symptoms in a college student population. I anticipate data collection will be complete by the end of February. From there, we plan to run a regression analysis with moderation using SPSS to assess the relationship between active and passive social media usage, and depressive and anxiety symptoms. I expect to find that passive social media usage is related both to anxiety and
depressive symptoms, while active social media usage is not related to either.