Does how people use social media change the association with mental health?

Background

Previous studies have explored the association between social media use and mental health among adolescents. However, few studies using nationally representative longitudinal data have explored this relationship for adults and how the effect might change depending on how people use social media.

Why did we do this research?

We explored the key findings and possible explanations for these patterns.

What did we do?

Study population: We used data from Understanding Society, a longitudinal population survey in the UK. We included 15,836 people, ages 16 or older. All participants had completed the Understanding Society survey in Wave 11 (2019-2021) and one year later (Wave 12, 2020-2022).

Exposure - social media use: Participants were asked about social media usage in 2019-2021. We divided social media behaviors by viewing content and posting content.

• frequency of viewing social media content; and

• frequency of posting social media content.

We also created 4 categories of social media usage:

• high viewing, high posting,

• high viewing, low posting,

• low viewing, high posting, or

• low viewing, low posting.

Outcome - mental health problems: We measured mental health problems using scores from the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-12), a 12-item questionnaire which assesses symptoms of anxiety, depression, and psychological distress. A higher score on the GHQ-12 indicates more mental health problems.

Confounders: We adjusted for sex, age, education, employment, and ethnicity. We also adjusted for mental health problems at baseline.

Analysis: We used linear regression to look at the association between social media use and mental health. We imputed missing data, and used the longitudinal weights provided by Understanding Society to ensure the results were representative of the UK population.

What did we find?

We found no evidence of that the frequency of viewing social media content effected mental health problems in the following year.

In contrast, we found that adults who posted daily on social media had more mental health problems than those who never posted on social media

When we considered both social media behaviours, we found that those who frequently viewed and posted on social media had more mental health problems a year later than those who rarely viewed or posted on social media (coef.=0.31, 95% CI: 0.04-0.58, P=0.03).

What does this mean?

We found that a high frequency of posting on social media was associated with increased mental health problems a year later. However, we did not find evidence of a similar association based on frequency of viewing social media content.

This provides evidence that some types of active social media use (i.e. posting) have a stronger link to mental health outcomes than some types of passive social media use (viewing). These results highlighted that the relationship between social media use and mental health is complex, and more research is needed to understand the mechanisms underlying these patterns to inform targeted interventions and policies.

Read more

You can read the full paper here Journal of Medical Internet Research. This builds on previous research we conducted exploring the longitudinal impact of social media use on adolescent mental health

This research was featured on the UCL News page and was covered by the Evening Standard.

Behind the research

This analysis was led Yue (Annie) Yu as part of her MSc in population health at UCL. She was supervised by Dr Ruth Plackett and me.