A new study arrives amid growing concern about social media’s role in the youth mental health crisis. While many recent studies have focused their attention on: How much screen time is too much?, Xiao and colleagues from Weill Cornell Medicine and Columbia University suggest that in addition to studying the impact of quantity of social media use, we need to look at the quality of engagement, and whether one’s relationship with social media also plays a vital role in driving mental health harms among children and youth.
They used the same data set as our last blog post, the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study, the largest long-term study on brain development and child health and mental health in the United States. This study gathered data from 4,285 U.S. children aged 10-15 years. Participants answered questionnaires about their mental health symptoms, and three digital platforms, social media, phones, and video games, were included in the analysis.
As this study followed the same children over a four-year period, the researchers were able to track how dependent the children became on screens, identifying distinct patterns for how compulsive screen use evolved over this time (i.e., low, increasingly, and high…
