Intro and methods

Introduction

Social media has become a everyday thing for teens in the United States. In 2015, pew research center did a study that found 92% of teens report going online daily and more than half of those teens use social media more than once a day. Social media has so many different effects on teenagers today. There are times where social media positively affects teens, but studies show the negative effects of social media outweigh the positive ones. So what aspects of teen’s lives are being impacted by social media? Social media impacts teen’s mental and physical health and their social lives.

Many research studies have studied different aspects of this topic. One of those being the connection between social media use and cyberbullying. In 2018, Pew Research Center released a report on cyberbullying. Studies showed that 59% of teens have reported being bullied or harassed online. These studies also showed that 57% of parents were worried about their children experiencing cyberbullying. Additional studies in 2014 by McAfee shared that 87% of teens have witnessed other people being bullied online. Studies done by Cox in 2014 reported that 60% of teens admit to a adult that they have been cyberbullied which is 20% more than the year before. Showing us that adults are becoming increasingly aware of cyberbullying.

Other studies about social media’s negative effects have looked at how kids are becoming addicted to their social media. Newport Academy released stats in 2017 reporting that 92% of teens use their social media everyday and 59% of parents believe their child is addicted to social media. In 2012, Andreassen developed The Facebook Addiction Scale that was a system that measured withdrawal features such as salvation, mood swing, reliability, conflict and relapse. The scale was given to 423 students and results showed many people scored high for reliability. Researchers at the University of Winchester took 20 people who said they were addicted to facebook and twitter and denied them access to their social media sites for four weeks. Most volunteers admitted to having withdrawal symptoms and one volunteer stated “I’ve felt alone and cut off from the world. My fingers seem to be programmed to seek out the Facebook app every time I pick up my phone.” All three of these studies showed us how common it is to become addicted to social media.

Since many teens are using social media multiple times a day and tend to be addicted to it, researchers looked into how person relationships are affected by social media use. Pew Research Center reported that 72% of all teens say they spend time with friends on social media and only 23% say they see their friends in person every day. Social media takes away from face-to-face interaction which is very important for teens development. In 1998, Kraut et al. published research that found the more time kids spend on social media was correlated with kids communicating with their family less. Additional studies from Psychology Today found that when parents came home from work they were greeted on 30% of the time and they were completely ignored 50% of the time. All these studies report how social media can negatively affect kids relationships with their friends and family.  

Despite all this research on how social media is negatively affecting teens, none of this research specifically looks into how it is affecting teens self-esteem. Mental health is so important nowadays and is greatly influenced by one's self-esteem. To see how teens are affected by social media, a survey was given to see what they think about social media affects. The survey also asks how social media has personally affected those people. The results of this study is going to tell us how social media makes teens feel about themselves.

Methods

Participants

The participants in this study were all people who use social media. The people who took the survey were between the ages of 13-25. The majority of the people who took this survey were women at the University of Iowa. There were 30 people who took this survey.

Procedure

The students who participated in the research were given a survey of five questions to take. The answers were completely anonymous. The first question that was asked was “What social media websites do you use most?” and the options were facebook, instagram, snapchat, and twitter. The second question asked was “How often do you find yourself comparing yourself  to other people on social media?”. The options to this answer were never, occasionally, often, and always. The third question in the survey was “Do you ever worry about not getting enough likes on your posts?” and the only options to this question was “yes or no”. The fourth question asks “Have you ever edited a photo to change the way you look?” and the only answer options for this were “yes or no”. Finally, the last question asks “How do you think social media effects teen’s self-esteem?”. The options for this question were “Makes them more confident”, “Makes them less confident”, and “Social media doesn’t have a effect on social media”. Additionally, for each question there was a option for people to type their own answer in case they didn’t agree with the options given.

Analysis

The end results from the survey were put into percentages. The percentages were represented by pie charts and graphs so the information was easy to compare. Conclusions were drawn from the answers that the participants gave.