For example, not long ago, the child and adolescent health, a sub-issue of the authoritative medical journal The Lancet, published a research paper. Scientists have followed more than 10000 British teenagers aged from13 to16. Their use of social media is negatively correlated with mental health data. The results show that the frequency of using social media is negatively correlated with mental health, that is, the higher the frequency of using social media.
Especially for girls, this correlation is more significant. This research has also been reported by domestic and foreign media recently. Perhaps it is under the influence of such reports that parents in China and abroad increasingly regard social media and its carrier smartphone as a scourge.
In the eyes of some sensitive parents, giving their children a smart phone may be tantamount to throwing a pack of drugs at their children. However, a report published on the website of Scientific American strongly questioned the idea that social media destroyed young people.
The author of the article is Liddy Adams, a science writer. He points out that these accusations against social media are based on very unreliable evidence, which is reflected in three aspects.
First, the collection of indicators is very inaccurate.
For example, most of the current studies ask respondents to report how long they use social media, but in fact this measurement is very inaccurate and will be systematically biased.
For example, the happier a person is, the more he underestimates the time he spends on social media. Then, if you collect these data in this way, you will surely come to the conclusion that the less you use social media, the healthier your heart will be, but this conclusion is obviously not credible.
Second, almost all studies only evaluate the frequency and duration of social media use, but not the content of the media.
You spent an hour brushing photos of cats and dogs in Weibo, and I spent the same time studying public classes of famous schools in Weibo. The same media may have completely different psychological effects on you and me because of different content, but the existing research has almost completely erased the differences in browsing content.
The third and most fatal flaw is that the causal relationship is not clear.
In these researches on social media, 80% are based on relevance, such as calculating how much time you spend brushing Weibo every day, measuring your anxiety on the other hand, and then calculating their correlation coefficient. But even if this result is related, for example, the longer you brush Weibo, the more anxious you get, which can't explain who caused it.
In fact, a group of researchers in Canada have followed up more than 600 teenagers and 1000 adults for many years. One of them found that the use of social media can't predict how depressed a person is, but the symptoms of depression can predict that an adolescent girl will use social media more frequently in the future.
In other words, even if there is a direct causal relationship between mental health and the use of social media, it may be that the decline of mental health has led people to prefer to use social media. It is precisely because of some serious defects in the existing research that even if some results suggest that social media will bring negative effects on mental health, we cannot easily draw the conclusion that social media is destroying young people.
So what may be the reliable conclusion?
Scientific American also mentioned in this article that in view of these shortcomings mentioned above, several groups of scientists are currently conducting several new studies with more rigorous methods and fewer loopholes. Their preliminary conclusion is that the use of social media may have both positive and negative effects on the mental health of teenagers.
Of course, but it's very important and has little impact. For example, one of the papers found that changes in the use of digital technology can only predict a 0.4% change in teenagers' happiness. The author of another paper said that the change of social media use in a year can only predict the change of life satisfaction by about 0.25%.
In other words, people's psychological state is regulated by many factors in life, and social media has little regulating effect. In fact, whether it is exposure to drugs or being bullied, the negative correlation between these factors and happiness far exceeds the influence of social media.
Adequate sleep and regular breakfast, these positive behaviors, have a much greater effect on improving happiness than social media. Therefore, the advice that can be given at present is that parents and adults who are worried that social media will poison teenagers like drugs may wish to relax. The impact of social media on children's mental health may not be as great as imagined, but it is only one of thousands of factors that affect children's growth.
It's just that for many adults, social media is a brand-new thing, which never existed when they were growing up, so they can't help but look at him. Of course, the relevant research is still in progress, so you may wish to pay attention to the relevant scientific progress.
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