Survey
Research question: How does social media affect the mental health of college students?
Methodology
To conduct my survey, I wanted my participants to be college students. I did not require them to be students at KSU. I feel this was the best age group because current college students have been using social media for most of their lives. To recruit participants, I sent my survey to 7 groupme chats. This totaled to somewhere around 450 potential participants, give or take a few overlapping people. I had a total of 32 participants, which was a response rate of 6% and surpassing my goal of 30 participants. I had originally wanted to do more recruitment, but ultimately groupme got me to my goal so quickly that I felt I did not need to do more.
Survey questions
"I actually delete my social media weekly or monthly depending on how much of a break I feel I need"
- Participant 20
My survey included 28 questions total. This included 11 multiple choice questions, 3 semantic differential questions, 13 Likert-type questions, and 1 open-ended question. I used the open-ended question as the opportunity to engage with my participants to see how the felt about this topic and they gave some amazing insight. I had asked them to explain what they thought about the relationship of mental health and social media, but also what they thought could be done to fix the issues (if they saw any). Many of the participants expressed similar understandings that I did towards social media -- social media can be bad for your mental health. They also reminded me that social media has it's good parts too. To read the responses in full, click the button below.
Conclusions
The main purpose of my survey was to engage with my peers; I wanted to see how social media effects them and also gather some of their perspectives. I believe I achieved this. Ultimately, the results of my survey told me quite a few things including:
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1.) College students use social media a lot -- specifically Tik Tok, Instagram, and Snapchat as the top platforms. However, I did forget to establish a time frame on the "how long do you use your x ranked platform questions. So that error may have thrown off those questions.
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2.) The top types of content viewed online include: Music (59.4% of participants say they view this), Beauty and DIY (both at 46.9%), and Travel and Cooking (both at 34.4%)
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3.) The participants tend to feel better (good/positive) when they open a social media platform versus when they close it.
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However, the most telling results of my survey was the Likert-type questions. These questions were based on the agree/disagree scale. I found that 46.9% of participants have felt anxious in the past 30 days. 62.5% strongly agreed or agreed that the beauty standards created by social media made them feel insecure. Overall, most of the participants feel a sense of accomplishment when someone likes or comments on their posts. 31.2% strongly agreed or agreed that they often felt anxious or depressed while using social media. 43% had said they were undecided/unsure if they had a negative relationship with social media.
These two scales show how the participants overall felt good/positive when they open social media vs feeling more bad/negative when they close it.
