This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Social technologies, digital tools that allow people to communicate and share content with each other online, have become a central way of communicating for many people worldwide. Yet the possible effects of these technologies on the well-being and life satisfaction of regular users are still widely debated.
Researchers at Georgetown University, the University of Southern California (USC) and the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) carried out a study aimed at better understanding how the use of social media and other interactive platforms may influence the life satisfaction of adults living in the United States. Their findings, published in Nature Human Behaviour, provide little evidence that changes in social technology use predicted adults' subsequent life satisfaction. "The debate around how the use of social technology affects life satisfaction elicits strong opinions, but there is a lot of disagreement underneath," Kostadin Kushlev, co-first author of the paper, told Phys.org.
"Different researchers have looked at the same data and come to opposite conclusions. "Part of the problem is the question itself. Asking whether social media is good for well-being is a bit like asking whether eating is good for your heart.
Different foods do very different things, and the effects also depend on the person and other factors." After reviewing earlier literature and opinions on this topic, Kushlev and his colleagues identified possible design elements that could be improved. For instance, some speak about social media as if it were a single technology, yet different platforms might affect users differently. "To improve on existing literature, we set out to do several things at once, first looking at each platform on its own," said Kushlev.
"Moreover, instead of taking a single 'snapshot,' we followed the same people over time. We also looked at whether answers differed by age, gender, race, education and income. Finally, we used a statistical approach that can distinguish a real effect from the trivial noise that turns up as significant in any large sample." As part of their study, the researchers surveyed 1,966 adults living in the United States across five survey rounds conducted three months apart.
These people were recruited as part of the Understanding America Study, a project run by USC aimed at surveying a nationally representative, probability-based sample of American adults online. "During each survey, we asked how often people used 10 technologies: FaceTime, texting, WhatsApp, email, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, X, TikTok and YouTube," said Kushlev. "We also measured their life satisfaction with an established three-item scale." When statistically analyzing the collected data, Kushlev and his colleagues wanted to answer two distinct questions.
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