Associations between Social Media Use and Psychological and Biological Stress in Adolescents
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Date
2020-05
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The Ohio State University
Abstract
Research on the relationship between social media use and stress has reported both positive and negative correlations; greater use was associated with increased stress in some studies and decreased stress in others. Self-reported measures of perceived stress have been more commonly examined in studies than biological measures. The purpose of this study was to explore the associations between self-reported perceived stress and biological stress measured using hair cortisol – a longer term measure of average cortisol levels over time as 1 cm of hair approximates 1 month of average cortisol output. Secondary data was examined using a representative sub-sample of 600 adolescents from the first wave of the Adolescent Health and Development in Context study – a prospective cohort study conducted in Franklin County, OH. The independent variable was frequency of adolescent social network use (several times a day [reference], about once a day, several times a week, and several times a month). The dependent variables were perceived stress (Cohen's Perceived Stress Scale) and biological stress (hair cortisol). Descriptive statistics were conducted to examine sample characteristics and bivariate regression analyses were utilized to examine associations. Adolescents on corticosteroids; missing data on social media use, stress or steroid use; or who had out of range cortisol levels were excluded for analysis for an analytic sample of 486 adolescents. Sensitivity analysis was conducted in which adolescents on corticosteroids or missing data on steroid use were not excluded; findings were comparable between the two samples. In the descriptive statistics, 59.3% of adolescents reported using social media several times a day. In the bivariate regression analysis, perceived stress was lower for youth who visited social network sites several times a month (b= -0.22, p= 0.0492), several times a week (b= -0.32, p= 0.0044), and approximately once a day (b= -0.34, p= 0.0002) in comparison to those who visited sites several times a day. There were no significant findings between frequency of use and hair cortisol. The findings suggest less frequent social media use is associated with lower levels of perceived stress; however, non-significant associations were found with hair cortisol. Potential reasons for the disparate findings between the measures may be due to differences between perceptions and biology as well timing of the measures. In addition, multivariable analysis in which potential confounding measures are included is needed as well as consideration for potential sex differences in the relationships.
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Keywords
Social Media, Adolescents, Psychological Stress, Biological Stress, Cortisol, Perceived Stress