Still, research looking for a direct relationship between social media and well-being didn’t find much.
“There are definitely hundreds of studies, almost all of which have shown rather small effects,” said behavioral psychologist Jeff Hancock, who led a meta-analysis of 226 such studies at Stanford University.
Not involved in the study, Dr. Hancock said what’s remarkable about the new study is its scope. It included two surveys covering a total of 84,000 people in the UK. One of these surveys followed more than 17,000 adolescents aged 10 to 21 over time, showing how their social media consumption and life satisfaction ratings changed from one year to the next.
Dr. “It’s just great in terms of scale,” Hancock said. He added that the rich age-based analysis is a huge improvement over previous studies, which tended to bring together all adolescents. “The teenage years are not like a fixed period of developmental life – they bring rapid changes,” he said.
The study found that heavy use of social media during early adolescence predicted lower rates of life satisfaction one year later. For girls, this sensitive period was between the ages of 11-13, while for boys it was between the ages of 14-15. Dr. Orben said this gender difference may be due to the fact that girls tend to hit puberty earlier than boys.
Dr. “We know that adolescent girls develop earlier than boys,” Orben said. “There are many things that could be potential drivers, whether social, cognitive or biological.”
Both boys and girls in the study entered a second period of social media sensitivity around age 19. Dr. “This was pretty surprising because it was so consistent across genders,” Orben said. At that age, she said, many people go through a great deal of social turmoil — like starting college, working in a new job, or living independently for the first time — that can change the way they interact with social media, she said.
