Poster #92 - Young Adolescent Girls' Evaluations of Social Media Platforms on Their Mental Health

• In Event: Poster Session 03

Abstract

In recent years, parents, news outlets, psychologists, and academics have sounded the alarm that American adolescents are in the grip of a mental health crisis. To many, social media and technology seems like the obvious culprit. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has made efforts to combat this by awarding $2 million in funding to the American Academy of Pediatrics to establish a National Center of Excellence on Social Media and Mental Wellness (SAMHSA, September 2022).

Girls and adolescents of color are increasingly vulnerable for mental health problems.
Suicides had been increasing among every age group in the United States (see Curtin & Heron, 2019) but rose most steeply among 10- to 14-year-old girls, with a rate that tripled between 1999 and 2014 (Curtin et al., 2016). While social media use is related to worse mental health more frequently among adolescent girls, it is not clear whether social media use is a cause of worse mental health, a symptom of it, or both.

To better understand the ways adolescent girls' understand social media and the possible relationships between social media use and mental health, a survey intended to gauge teens’ perceptions of different popular social media platforms is currently being conducted. The survey examines use of social media design features and experiences, especially as they relate to positive and negative aspects of users' mental health.

This survey of 1,000 girls ages 11-15 years old includes a mix of participants recruited from a probability panel and an opt-in web panel, allowing for over-sampling of traditionally harder to recruit participants. Data collection will be completed by the end of November, 2022 and analysis will consider platform, user age, and user ethnicity differences in positive and negative content, features, and design affordances related to mental health.

Results from the survey could be used to create a first-of-its-kind index of best and worst social media platforms for teens based on platform design and affordances (such as social metrics, prevalence of addictive features, ability to connect to friends or the public, etc.), exposure to risky or negative content (such as cyberbullying, body image content, hate speech, etc.), and exposure to positive content (such as body positivity, mood enhancement, or learning content). Results may be used to highlight the ways in which specific popular social media platforms are facilitating experiences that are known from earlier research to be related to positive and negative aspects of mental health.

Authors

• Supreet Mann, Common Sense Media
  Presenting Author

• Michael Robb, Common Sense Media

• Jacqueline Nesi, Brown University