Social media may be helping you to keep in touch with your long lost mates, or broadcast about your talents and achievements, making it an excellent tool to help you brag, it isn’t really known for making one’s life wholesome. Especially if the user is a teenager. According to a study, social media is responsible for lowering the life satisfaction in teens. However, the effects are said to be more brutal for girls than boys.
The study was conducted on 12,000 British teenagers. The study added that lower satisfaction made users increase the social media usage, and vice vera, making it a vicious cycle that won’t stop, but these effects were more consistently seen in females, as opposed to males.
“Given the rapid pace of technological advancement in recent years, the question of how our increasing use of technology to interact with each other affects our well-being has become increasingly important,” said Andrew Przybylski, Professor at the University of Oxford in Britain.
The study added that the effects of social media were not a one-way street, they are nuanced, reciprocal, possibly contingent on gender. The study was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
In hopes to get an honest insight on the social media usage among teenagers and how it reflected on their lives, the researchers used an eight-year survey of UK households.
The aim of the study was to study not only whether adolescents who report more social media use have lower life satisfaction but also whether the reverse is true.
The researchers selected the “UK Household Panel Study” for their analysis because it provided the highest quality longitudinal data available.
“While our study is a very promising step towards robust science in this area, it is only the first step. To ultimately understand how the diverse uses of social media affect teenagers we need industry data,” said Amy Orben of the University of Oxford.