(Newswire.net — February 21, 2020) — The impact of social networking on teens and how satisfied they are with life is very limited and “weak”, according to a study conducted on 12,000 British adolescents.
Family, friends and school have a greater impact on their sense of satisfaction, a team of researchers at Oxford University says after they reviewed the findings from their study.
Researchers are calling on companies to publish data on how people use social networks so they can better understand how technology is affecting the lives of young people.
The study, published in the journal PNAS, seeks to answer the question of whether teens that use social networks in amounts that are above average are dissatisfied with their lives and whether adolescents who are dissatisfied with life are more likely to use social networks.
Previous research on the relationship between technology and the mental health of adolescents and teenagers has often been conflicting.
Professors Andrew Przybylski and Amy Orbean, from the Oxford Internet Institute, claim that previous researches were incomplete and don’t have all of the important variables included.
Their study shows that for the most part, theses about the links between the joy of life and the use of social networks are trivial because they relate to less than one percent of teens – and that social networking influence is not a one-way street.
Professor Przybylski, head of the research team at the institute, says that in “99.75 percent of cases, whether one is satisfied with life has nothing to do with social networks.”
The tests ran from 2009 to 2017. Researchers spoke to thousands of teens between the ages of 10 and 15 who spend a lot of time on social networks so that they could gauge how satisfied the teens were with different aspects of their lives.
They found that social networks affect girls more than boys.
Researchers say it is important to identify which youth groups are more vulnerable to social networking and what factors make them feel more or less satisfied.
They plan to discuss this with big companies and learn more about how young people use different applications, not just how much time they spend.