Article Review on Social Media Use and Emotional Well-being

In the year 2020, Schønning et al. compiled a comprehensive analysis of studies that investigated the correlation between the utilization of social media by adolescents and their psychological and emotional well-being. The authors provided many pieces of background information regarding the daily use of social media by adolescents and young people worldwide in the introduction. Throughout the past few years, a significant amount of research has been conducted to examine the connection between the use of social media. On the other hand, they did mention that it is still difficult to determine the outcomes because many studies have arrived at unique conclusions. Because this topic is currently the subject of a heated debate, the authors stated that their primary objective in conducting this scoping review was to compile the huge and expanding body of research on the connection between the use of social media by adolescents and the potential negative impacts on mental health and other health outcomes.

Within the "Methods" section, the authors provided a richly detailed explanation of the procedures they used to conduct their systematic search and analysis. To learn about people's social media behaviors, platforms, and mental health outcomes, they employed a variety of search keywords to search through a large number of important databases in psychology and health that encompassed the past five years. Two distinct reviewers underwent the process of filtering which research was relevant by using the predetermined criteria and which ones should be excluded. As noted in these reviews, the teen and young adult groups, the study methodologies, and the overall quality were considered most important. Subsequently, the results measured against the samples’ demographics, the factors in the social media platforms that were explored, and assessment of the mental health categories were thoroughly compiled and organized from the relevant research. Two sets of study methodologies that were in the recent past under discussion were employed in performing a scoping review method and an analytical technique in building a tabular synthesis to summarize what the selected studies considered most relevant.

In the section titled "Results," each of the seventy-nine studies considered for inclusion was thoroughly explored. According to Schønning et al. (2020), most researchers, which accounts for 99.4 percent of all researchers, employed quantitative methodologies. Further, 57% of the researchers utilized a cross-sectional study design, which is more than half of the total number of researchers! Twenty-nine percent of all the research that was conducted focused on depression, making it the mental health disease that received the most attention. 39% of the research focused on Facebook, while another 14% investigated unnamed social media sites. The involvement measurements employed in the study were divided into two categories: the frequency with which users used social media and the length of time they used it. Even though 92% of the participants in the study were of both sexes, gender was not one of the variables utilized to explain the phenomenon being investigated. Moreover, 77% of the research papers used social media websites as an independent variable.

The authors provided a comprehensive summary of their scoping study as part of the discussion section. According to the findings of Schønning and colleagues' study from 2020, the majority of the studies that were examined were examining the potential connections between the use of social media and various indicators of mental health issues that are not favorable. The vast majority of this research, on the other hand, did not investigate the connections between using social media and having a healthy mental state. According to the review, a sufficient amount of research has not been conducted to differentiate between the various forms of online engagement and the utilization of platforms. In several different ways, individuals who engage in these behaviors are likely to have issues with their mental health. The authors' investigation led them to conclude that additional research needs to be conducted on the topic in question. The number of studies that investigate excellent connections and research that dissects how people use social media in its components, such as the distinction between uploading something and simply watching it, needs to be significantly increased. The unknown linkages between the usage of the internet by adolescents and their health could be clarified by this stratified investigation.

Schønning et al. (2020) conducted a comprehensive analysis of 79 research articles subjected to peer review and published between 2015 and 2020. Methods, samples, measurements, and the articles' most important results were scrutinized. In particular, the methods section laid the groundwork for the problem, the findings section organized the key study aspects numerically, the discussion section examined pertinent prior research, and the introduction provided context for the subject matter. This study looked at every one of these components. Adolescents' use of social media has been the subject of a significant number of studies. This exhaustive review gathered and analyzed it, resulting in a comprehensive and intricate totality. Due to the exact methodologies that were utilized and the manner in which the data and conclusions were conveyed, this difficult topic was much simpler to comprehend.