Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Oct 4, 2022
Date Accepted: Feb 27, 2023
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
The longitudinal impact of social media use on UK adolescent mental health: A Longitudinal Observational Study
ABSTRACT
Background:
Cross-sectional studies have found a relationship between social media use and depression and anxiety in young people, but few longitudinal studies using representative data and mediation analysis have been conducted to understand the causal pathways of this relationship.
Objective:
We aimed to examine the longitudinal relationship between social media use and young people’s mental health and examined the role of self-esteem and social connectedness as potential mediators.
Methods:
The sample included 3,228 10-15-year-olds from Understanding Society (2009-2019), a UK longitudinal household survey. Mental health problems measured by the Strengths & Difficulties Questionnaire were assessed at ages 14-15. The number of hours spent on social media was measured on a 5-point scale from “none” to “7 or more hours” at ages 12-13. Self-esteem and social connectedness (number of friends and happiness with friendships) were measured at ages 13-14. Covariates included demographic and household variables. Unadjusted and adjusted multilevel linear regression models were used to estimate the association between social media use and mental health. We used path analysis with structural equation modelling to investigate the mediation pathways.
Results:
In adjusted analysis, there was a non-significant linear trend showing more time spent on social media was related to poorer mental health two-years later (n= 2,603, b=0.21, 95% CI, -0.43--0.84, P=.52). In unadjusted path analysis, 68% of the effect of social media use on mental health was mediated by self-esteem (indirect effect, n=2,569, b=0.70, 95% CI 0.15-1.30, P=.02) but not social connectedness. In adjusted path analysis, self-esteem was not a significant mediator (indirect effect, n=2,316, b=0.24 95% CI -0.12-0.66, P=.22). Similar results were found in imputed data.
Conclusions:
There was little evidence to suggest that more time spent on social media was associated with later mental health problems in UK adolescents. This study shows the importance of longitudinal studies to examine this relationship and suggests interventions to improve mental health associated with social media use should consider the role of factors like self-esteem. Clinical Trial: Not applicable
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.