Poster #112 - The Effects of Social Media Usage on Pre-Adolescents’ Depressive Symptoms

• In Event: Poster Session 13

Abstract

Introduction
The majority of youth report using social media on a daily basis (Anderson & Jiang, 2018). However, over the past two years, social media has transformed from a place of escapism to a space to share messages about the current sociopolitical climate. Through social media, youth are exposed to images of police brutality and anti-immigration rhetoric (Campbell et. al., 2020; Tynes et al., 2019). Exposure to such images has been demonstrated to impact youth’s mental health as seeing these images cause youth to engage in “cumulative witnessing” of racialized violence and discrimination (Anderson et al., 2022). Further, the literature is limited in assessing the effects of varying social media platforms’ on youth depressive symptoms, as it primarily focuses on how much time youth spend on social media and what they are exposed to on various platforms (Keles et al., 2020; Vannucci et al., 2019; Vannucci & Ohannessian, 2019). Studies surrounding social media use and youth’s depressive symptoms have primarily focused on adolescent and college-aged youth (Chavez et al., 2019). The current study aims to investigate how social media use during a period of a divisive sociopolitical climate might impact pre-adolescent youth’s depressive symptoms.

Hypotheses
We propose three hypotheses: (1) child report of social media use will be associated with higher child depressive symptoms, (2) child report of increased sociopolitical climate stressors will be associated with higher child depressive symptoms, and (3) child report of healthy social media habits and feelings will be associated with lower child depressive symptoms.

Methods:
Participants in this sample are part of a larger, longitudinal research project with Black and Latinx parent-child dyads. Data in this analysis was collected when children were in seventh grade (Wave 8). A modified version of the Political Climate Scale (Roosa et al., 2008) developed by Roche and colleagues (2018) was self-reported by parents and children. The Child Depression Index (CDI; Kovacs, 2011) was used to assess symptoms of depression among children. To assess children’s social media use we adapted a scale used in the PEW Research Center’s report on teen social media usage (Anderson & Jiang, 2018). This scale assesses children's use of the following social media sites: Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube, Tumblr, Reddit, and Facebook. For the purposes of this analysis, we only used social media sites that are predominately used among pre-adolescents (i.e, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat). The social media use scale is also divided into two subscales assessing children’s healthy habits (i.e., child organizes social media feed to only see certain types of content) and healthy feelings towards social media (i.e, social media makes the child feel more insecure/confident).

Results:
Bivariate correlations indicated that Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat use were positively correlated with child depressive symptoms. Additionally, child report of healthy social media feelings was negatively correlated with child depressive symptoms. Lastly, child report of the political climate was positively correlated with child depressive symptoms and healthy social media feelings. Results of bivariate correlations can be found in Table 1.

Authors

• Nikia Pinson
  Presenting Author

• LaRen Morton, University of Georgia

• Dominique L. LaBarrie, University of Georgia

• Margaret O'Brien Caughy, University of Georgia