Slashdot Mirror
Study Links Decline In Teenagers' Happiness To Smartphones (pressherald.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Press Herald: In a study published Monday in the journal Emotion, psychologists from San Diego State University and the University of Georgia used data on mood and media culled from roughly 1.1 million U.S. teens to figure out why a decades-long rise in happiness and satisfaction among U.S. teenagers suddenly shifted course in 2012 and declined sharply over the next four years. Was this sudden reversal a response to an economy that tanked in 2007 and stayed bad well into 2012? Or did it have its roots in a very different watershed event: the 2007 introduction of the smartphone, which put the entire online world at a user's fingertips?
In the new study, researchers tried to find it by plumbing a trove of eighth-, 10th- and 12th-graders' responses to queries on how they felt about life and how they used their time. They found that between 1991 and 2016, adolescents who spent more time on electronic communication and screens -- social media, texting, electronic games, the internet -- were less happy, less satisfied with their lives and had lower self-esteem. TV watching, which declined over the nearly two decades they examined, was similarly linked to lower psychological well-being. By contrast, adolescents who spent more time on non-screen activities had higher psychological well-being. They tended to profess greater happiness, higher self-esteem and more satisfaction with their lives. While these patterns emerged in the group as a whole, they were particularly clear among eighth- and 10th-graders, the authors found: "Every non-screen activity was correlated with greater happiness, and every screen activity was correlated with less happiness."
In the new study, researchers tried to find it by plumbing a trove of eighth-, 10th- and 12th-graders' responses to queries on how they felt about life and how they used their time. They found that between 1991 and 2016, adolescents who spent more time on electronic communication and screens -- social media, texting, electronic games, the internet -- were less happy, less satisfied with their lives and had lower self-esteem. TV watching, which declined over the nearly two decades they examined, was similarly linked to lower psychological well-being. By contrast, adolescents who spent more time on non-screen activities had higher psychological well-being. They tended to profess greater happiness, higher self-esteem and more satisfaction with their lives. While these patterns emerged in the group as a whole, they were particularly clear among eighth- and 10th-graders, the authors found: "Every non-screen activity was correlated with greater happiness, and every screen activity was correlated with less happiness."
Considering the fact that I was a teen suffering from depression. I know, I know, correlation != causation, but I remember a slew of depressed teens when I was growing up in the 90s. This is not a new phenomenon. So I am curious as to what they used for a control group?
I don't buy into this study and would like see follow up studies to confirm this "link."
Place something witty here
Online activities are obviously the cause of, and cannot possibly be an escape from, unhappiness with available offline activities.
It could be that before, they were in blissful ignorance of how people felt about them; with social networking, it isn't possible to ignore what people think of you, and how much better than you their life is, and who they spend their time with.
..........that I grew up before era of smartphones and social media. I mean, I always knew I wasn't very popular, but at least I wasn't confronted with an unavoidable digital readout of my unpopularity hundreds of times a day.
Alternate formulation of the conclusion: now that they can observe the world more easily, American teenagers start to realize how crappy the world really is, completely unlike the imagined perfect America they have been fed all their lives like their parents and their parents' parents, and therefore no longer feel the same entitlement and superiority towards the rest of the world.
And now they see how crappy the world is, maybe they will try to change it.
I'm facing the same thing. Taking away my FD's smartphone will be considered, by her, as torture.
So also is picking her up on time when her Wednesday group is finished, requiring her to finish her laundry in 24 hours, cleaning her room sufficiently to see 4 square feet of carpet clear of debris, taking her thyroid meds, and completing her school work - not earning passing grades, but completing assigned work.
It's hell, I know. But the smartphone is not good for her. Now, since she's managed to crack the screen less than 30 day after it was repaired/replaced, and refusing to use a protective case, it's getting very easy to take the phone away. More so because profanity and public insults are incompatible with privileges.
And yet, I know that if I take the phone, and the laptop, she will either go to work to crack the school firewall on her Chromebook, or more likely get a secret phone to circumvent my actions. I'll have to get the phone detector out and do regular searches, and watch her take the dog for a walk so she can dig the phone out of the bushes and keep up. Her social life is mostly SMS and game chats. Sadly, it's a negative influence on her well-being, and changing that is not easy, especially since she thinks it's normal-ish.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
While it is not necessary to have a control group, I was wondering if the findings could be replicated in other countries where smartphone adoption occured earlier than it did in the U.S.. Particularly in Finland.
It might not be the devices so much as it could be the content accessed on the devices. In particular the rise of gamification of social networks which was resulting in a large number of articles being published about this in 2011 & 2012. The link below provides a compilation of many of these studies published about the time of the identified 2012 threshold.
https://cyberpsychology.eu/art...
Disclosure: I'm a high school guidance counselor
I see much higher levels of depression and anxiety today than I did 10 or 15 years ago. I see a few factors driving this:
--Validation of an activity. When many of us were growing up, if some student was caught doing something by their peers, it spread as a pure rumor. Now it spreads with photographic evidence and isn't spread by the relatively slow word-of-mouth but by much quicker social networking (I'll including texting in this as well). One could also include that "the internet never forgets" so that embarassing photo of you is shared, screencaptured, saved etc... These awful experiences that might have been done by previous generations are now just memories by a few people, and not archived in "your permanent social media record." (which is most likely only partially in your control, since you don't know who has copies of it).
--Fear of Missing Out. Very common that students are now concerned that they won't have the latest or same gadget/clothes/items/vacation/party/event. They find out via photos/texts/videos very quickly and then realize that they don't have them. Many adults think of this as "keeping up with the Jones'" next-door experiences. Social media is carefully curated by the posters (everyone posts about their vacation, but not their fights with their spouse). At my school, the Jr/Sr girls create FB groups to post their prom dresses so that nobody else buys the same one as they do. While this seems good at first, it creates stress because it ends up being an arms race, for which many girls cannot compete financially, or that it leads to shaming.
--Low Bandwidth Communication. Forms of communication that require "more bandwidth" are more effective. Text email phone call video call in person. Students, like most people are often shy about having critical conversations, and especially since they are kids, will fall back on what is easiest for them. Historically, if you broke up with someone, you had to do it in person or atleast over the phone. Today, a text to your high school bf/gf and it's over. The recipient of the message is blindsided with some truly awful information sent over a minimum effort medium and is never given the chance to have a conversation about it.