“Social Media Use and Its Impact on Adolescent Mental Health: An Umbrella Review of the Evidence”, 2022-04 ():
Literature reviews on how social media use affects adolescent mental health have accumulated at an unprecedented rate of late. Yet, a higher-level integration of the evidence is still lacking.
We fill this gap with an up-to-date umbrella review, a review of reviews published between 2019 and mid-2021. Our search yielded 25 reviews: 7 meta-analyses, 9 systematic, and 9 narrative reviews. Results showed that most reviews interpreted the associations between social media use and mental health as ‘weak’ or ‘inconsistent’, whereas a few qualified the same associations as ‘substantial’ and ‘deleterious’.
We summarize the gaps identified in the reviews, provide an explanation for their diverging interpretations, and suggest several avenues for future research.
[Keywords: meta-review, social networking sites, SNS, Facebook, Instagram, well-being, depression, depressive symptoms]
…Main findings of the reviews: As Table 1 shows, 5 meta-analyses yielded associations of general use of social network sites (SNS use) with higher levels of adolescent ill-being that ranged from very small to moderate (r = 0.05 to r = 0.17)[14, 17, 18, 19, 20], and one did not find such an association (r = 0.02 ns[15]). As for well-being, one meta-analysis found that SNS use was weakly associated with higher levels of well-being (r = +0.05),19 whereas another found that it was weakly related to lower levels of well-being (r = −0.06).17 However, the latter study aggregated well-being outcomes (eg. happiness, life satisfaction) with ill-being outcomes (eg. reversed depression and anxiety scores) in a composite ‘well-being’ score. When this meta-analysis analyzed happiness, life satisfaction, and depression separately, it found that SNS use was associated with both higher levels of well-being and ill-being.17
In all, the available meta-analytic evidence suggests that SNS use is weakly associated with higher levels of ill-being[14, 17, 18, 19, 20] but also with higher levels of well-being[17,19], a result that suggests that ill-being is not simply the flip-side of well-being and vice versa, and that both outcomes should be investigated in their own right[11,39]. Finally, all meta-analyses reported considerable variability in the reported associations. For example, in the meta-analysis by et al 2020,14 the reported associations of SMU with depressive symptoms ranged from r = −0.10 to r = +0.33.