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. 2020 Aug 14;17(16):5921.
doi: 10.3390/ijerph17165921.

Social Media Use and Depressive Symptoms-A Longitudinal Study from Early to Late Adolescence

Kati Puukko  1 , Lauri Hietajärvi  1 , Erika Maksniemi  1 , Kimmo Alho  2 , Katariina Salmela-Aro  1
Affiliations

Social Media Use and Depressive Symptoms-A Longitudinal Study from Early to Late Adolescence

Kati Puukko et al. Int J Environ Res Public Health. .

Abstract

An increasing number of studies have addressed how adolescents' social media use is associated with depressive symptoms. However, few studies have examined whether these links occur longitudinally across adolescence when examined at the individual level of development. This study investigated the within-person effects between active social media use and depressive symptoms using a five-wave longitudinal dataset gathered from 2891 Finnish adolescents (42.7% male, age range 13-19 years). Sensitivity analysis was conducted, adjusting for gender and family financial status. The results indicate that depressive symptoms predicted small increases in active social media use during both early and late adolescence, whereas no evidence of the reverse relationship was found. Yet, the associations were very small, statistically weak, and somewhat inconsistent over time. The results provide support for the growing notion that the previously reported direct links between social media use and depressive symptoms might be exaggerated. Based on these findings, we suggest that the impact of social media on adolescents' well-being should be approached through methodological assumptions that focus on individual-level development.

Keywords: adolescence; cross-lagged panel model; depressive symptoms; longitudinal study; social media.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Random Intercept Cross-Lagged Panel Model Linking Social Media use (SoMe) with Depressive Symptoms (DepS) from early to late adolescence. T1–T6 indicate the time points within the data collection. Dashed lines indicate paths that were fixed to one. Solid lines between the within-level variables indicate that the paths were set equal across time (excluding paths T3–T5). Note: *, two-year gap in data collection.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Standardized within-person effects (β) between social media use (SoMe) and depressive symptoms (DepS). Thicker black lines represent significant effects (*** p < 0.001), narrower almost significant effects (* p < 0.05), grey lines non-significant effects (p > 0.05). Correlated changes are presented with two-way arrows. Autoregressive and cross-lagged paths were set equal across time, excluding paths between T3 and T5 (standardized estimates differ slightly due to different variances).
Figure 3
Figure 3
Standardized within-person effects (β) between Social Media use (SoMe) and Depressive Symptoms (DepS) when gender and family’s financial status are included as covariates. Thicker black lines indicate significant effects (*** p < 0.001) and grey lines indicate non-significant effects (p > 0.05). Correlational changes are presented with two-way arrows. Autoregressive and cross-lagged paths were set equal across time, excluding paths between T3 and T5 (standardized estimates differ slightly due to different variances).
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