Previously submitted to: JMIR Mental Health (no longer under consideration since May 05, 2025)
Date Submitted: Jan 14, 2025
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited.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.
Engagement in Academic-Based Comparisons on Social Networking Sites and Mental Health Outcomes among Post-secondary Students in Canada: A Cross-sectional Analysis
ABSTRACT
Background:
Post-secondary students are the largest age demographic using social networking sites (SNS). Since students are placed in competitive environments surrounded by peers with similar goals, they are more prone to engaging in upward academic-based comparisons. Given that post-secondary students are already at increased risk of developing mental disorders, determining the link between engagement in online comparisons and mental health outcomes among this population is warranted.
Objective:
This paper investigates the relationship between engagement in upward academic-based comparisons on SNS and mental health outcomes among a sample of Canadian post-secondary students.
Methods:
A secondary analysis of data collected through a national cross-sectional study of post-secondary student mental health and wellbeing was conducted to assess this relationship, controlling for the effects of demographics, SNS platform used, and other comparison-based stressors.
Results:
Four main findings are reported: (1) Associations between engaging in upward academic-based comparisons on SNS and other comparison-based stressors were all statistically significant (P<.001) and students who engaged in upward academic-based comparisons on SNS rated other comparison-based stressors as significantly higher in both severity and frequency compared to those who did not, (2) the association between engaging in upward academic-based comparisons on SNS and the type of SNS platform used was statistically significant across all platforms except Facebook (X2=4.84, P=0.30) and Twitter (X2=4.61, P=0.33), (3) the use of TikTok was linked to worsened mental health outcomes (psychological distress ß = 0.50, P=.26; anxiety ß = 0.32, P=.03; depression ß = 0.45, P=.01) whereas the use of LinkedIn was associated with improved mental health outcomes (psychological distress ß = -1.11, P=.003; anxiety ß = -0.39, P=.05; depression ß = -0.48, P= .04), (4) engagement in upward academic-based comparisons on SNS was significantly related to increased anxiety scores, but not depression or general psychological distress scores.
Conclusions:
Since the study sample consisted of students attending a single university in Eastern Ontario, these findings are not generalizable to the broader Canadian post-secondary student population. However, they provide evidence that helps contribute to further exploration of this topic area. Future research should explore the effects of online academic-based comparisons on the mental health of post-secondary students in more diverse samples as well as interventions that may help address the mental health impacts of students’ SNS usage.
Citation
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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.