Social Media Use and Depressive Symptoms Among United States Adolescents

The Authors Respond

“…In our study, we used a large nationally representative sample to investigate the impact of social media use on depressive symptoms among U.S. adolescents. We ultimately concluded that daily social media use was not a strong or consistent risk factor for depressive symptoms and did not explain recent spikes in this outcome [1]. Shidid and Viswanathan supply valid points for further nuance and context in this area of research.…”

There is no evidence that associations between adolescents’ digital technology engagement and mental health problems have increased

“…In secondary data analyses, these problems are compounded by a general lack of adherence to consistent standards (Weston et al, 2019), which threatens the validity and robustness of reported associations, as the many choices leading to a reported analysis can engender misrepresentative estimates (Orben & Przybylski, 2019a). Studies that have adopted more systematic approaches to estimating associations between well-being and technology engagement have shown that the resulting relations depend on gender, arbitrary analytic choices, and the exact variables included in the analyses (Bjerre-Nielsen et al, 2020;Jensen et al, 2019;Kreski et al, 2020;Orben et al, 2019). In addition, most of this literature is limited by its use of self-reports of technology use, which are known to be biased and noisy indicators of true amounts of engagement, and lead to inaccurate estimated relations between health and well-being (Johannes et al, 2020;Parry et al, 2020;Scharkow, 2016;Shaw et al, 2020).…”

“…Although the possibility that digital technologies' effects on adolescents are not static would have substantial implications for regulation, and this potential is often discussed in public conversation, the idea has garnered only limited attention in empirical studies which have typically treated the relation as invariant over time (but see Ferguson, 2020;Kreski et al, 2020). The current study therefore aims to provide one of the first large-scale examinations into whether the associations between adolescent technology use and mental health shift over time.…”

“…Our primary interest was determining whether the relationship between technology use and adolescent mental health had changed over different timespans. As a supplementary analysis, because previous literature has highlighted important differences between boys and girls in novel technologies' associations with adolescent mental health (Kelly et al, 2018;Kreski et al, 2020), we also investigated the moderating role of sex.…”

Elucidating the Role of Behavior in Social Media Use and Depression

“…To the Editor: This is in reference to the article titled "Social Media Use and Depressive Symptoms Among United States Adolescents" by Kreski et al [1]. Social media use has increasingly played a ubiquitous role in the lives of adolescents in the U.S.…”