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• Published: 01 July 2020

The effect of social media on well-being differs from adolescent to adolescent

• Ine Beyens   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-7023-867X 1 ,
• J. Loes Pouwels   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-9586-392X 1 ,
• Irene I. van Driel   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-7810-9677 1 ,
• Loes Keijsers   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-8580-6000 2 &
• Patti M. Valkenburg   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-0477-8429 1  

Scientific Reports volume  10 , Article number:  10763 ( 2020 ) Cite this article

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The question whether social media use benefits or undermines adolescents’ well-being is an important societal concern. Previous empirical studies have mostly established across-the-board effects among (sub)populations of adolescents. As a result, it is still an open question whether the effects are unique for each individual adolescent. We sampled adolescents’ experiences six times per day for one week to quantify differences in their susceptibility to the effects of social media on their momentary affective well-being. Rigorous analyses of 2,155 real-time assessments showed that the association between social media use and affective well-being differs strongly across adolescents: While 44% did not feel better or worse after passive social media use, 46% felt better, and 10% felt worse. Our results imply that person-specific effects can no longer be ignored in research, as well as in prevention and intervention programs.

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Introduction

Ever since the introduction of social media, such as Facebook and Instagram, researchers have been studying whether the use of such media may affect adolescents’ well-being. These studies have typically reported mixed findings, yielding either small negative, small positive, or no effects of the time spent using social media on different indicators of well-being, such as life satisfaction and depressive symptoms (for recent reviews, see for example 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 ). Most of these studies have focused on between-person associations, examining whether adolescents who use social media more (or less) often than their peers experience lower (or higher) levels of well-being than these peers. While such between-person studies are valuable in their own right, several scholars 6 , 7 have recently called for studies that investigate within-person associations to understand whether an increase in an adolescent’s social media use is associated with an increase or decrease in that adolescent’s well-being. The current study aims to respond to this call by investigating associations between social media use and well-being within single adolescents across multiple points in time 8 , 9 , 10 .

Person-specific effects

To our knowledge, four recent studies have investigated within-person associations of social media use with different indicators of adolescent well-being (i.e., life satisfaction, depression), again with mixed results 6 , 11 , 12 , 13 . Orben and colleagues 6 found a small negative reciprocal within-person association between the time spent using social media and life satisfaction. Likewise, Boers and colleagues 12 found a small within-person association between social media use and increased depressive symptoms. Finally, Coyne and colleagues 11 and Jensen and colleagues 13 did not find any evidence for within-person associations between social media use and depression.

Earlier studies that investigated within-person associations of social media use with indicators of well-being have all only reported average effect sizes. However, it is possible, or even plausible, that these average within-person effects may have been small and nonsignificant because they result from sizeable heterogeneity in adolescents’ susceptibility to the effects of social media use on well-being (see 14 , 15 ). After all, an average within-person effect size can be considered an aggregate of numerous individual within-person effect sizes that range from highly positive to highly negative.

Some within-person studies have sought to understand adolescents’ differential susceptibility to the effects of social media by investigating differences between subgroups. For instance, they have investigated the moderating role of sex to compare the effects of social media on boys versus girls 6 , 11 . However, such a group-differential approach, in which potential differences in susceptibility are conceptualized by group-level moderators (e.g., gender, age) does not provide insights into more fine-grained differences at the level of the single individual 16 . After all, while girls and boys each represent a homogenous group in terms of sex, they may each differ on a wide array of other factors.

As such, although worthwhile, the average within-person effects of social media on well-being obtained in previous studies may have been small or non-significant because they are diluted across a highly heterogeneous population (or sub-population) of adolescents 14 , 15 . In line with the proposition of media effects theories that each adolescent may have a unique susceptibility to the effects of social media 17 , a viable explanation for the small and inconsistent findings in earlier studies may be that the effect of social media differs from adolescent to adolescent. The aim of the current study is to investigate this hypothesis and to obtain a better understanding of adolescents’ unique susceptibility to the effects of social media on their affective well-being.

Social media and affective well-being

Within-person studies have provided important insights into the associations of social media use with cognitive well-being (e.g., life satisfaction 6 ), which refers to adolescents’ cognitive judgment of how satisfied they are with their life 18 . However, the associations of social media use with adolescents’ affective well-being (i.e., adolescents’ affective evaluations of their moods and emotions 18 ) are still unknown. In addition, while earlier within-person studies have focused on associations with trait-like conceptualizations of well-being 11 , 12 , 13 , that is, adolescents’ average well-being across specific time periods 18 , there is a lack of studies that focus on well-being as a momentary affective state. Therefore, we extend previous research by examining the association between adolescents’ social media use and their momentary affective well-being. Like earlier experience sampling (ESM) studies among adults 19 , 20 , we measured adolescents’ momentary affective well-being with a single item. Adolescents’ momentary affective well-being was defined as their current feelings of happiness, a commonly used question to measure well-being 21 , 22 , which has high convergent validity, as evidenced by the strong correlations with the presence of positive affect and absence of negative affect.

To assess adolescents’ momentary affective well-being (henceforth referred to as well-being), we conducted a week-long ESM study among 63 middle adolescents ages 14 and 15. Six times a day, adolescents were asked to complete a survey using their own mobile phone, covering 42 assessments per adolescent, assessing their affective well-being and social media use. In total, adolescents completed 2,155 assessments (83.2% average compliance).

We focused on middle adolescence, since this is the period in life characterized by most significant fluctuations in well-being 23 , 24 . Also, in comparison to early and late adolescents, middle adolescents are more sensitive to reactions from peers and have a strong tendency to compare themselves with others on social media and beyond. Because middle adolescents typically use different social media platforms, in a complementary way 25 , 26 , 27 , each adolescent reported on his/her use of the three social media platforms that s/he used most frequently out of the five most popular social media platforms among adolescents: WhatsApp, followed by Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, and, finally, the chat function of games 28 . In addition to investigating the association between overall social media use and well-being (i.e., the summed use of adolescents’ three most frequently used platforms), we examined the unique associations of the two most popular platforms, WhatsApp and Instagram 28 .

Like previous studies on social media use and well-being, we distinguished between active social media use (i.e., “activities that facilitate direct exchanges with others” 29 ) and passive social media use (i.e., “consuming information without direct exchanges” 29 ). Within-person studies among young adults have shown that passive but not active social media use predicts decreases in well-being 29 . Therefore, we examined the unique associations of adolescents’ overall active and passive social media use with their well-being, as well as active and passive use of Instagram and WhatsApp, specifically. We investigated categorical associations, that is, whether adolescents would feel better or worse if they had actively or passively used social media. And we investigated dose–response associations to understand whether adolescents’ well-being would change as a function of the time they had spent actively or passively using social media.

The hypotheses and the design, sampling and analysis plan were preregistered prior to data collection and are available on the Open Science Framework, along with the code used in the analyses ( https://osf.io/nhks2 ). For details about the design of the study and analysis approach, see Methods.

In more than half of all assessments (68.17%), adolescents had used social media (i.e., one or more of their three favorite social media platforms), either in an active or passive way. Instagram (50.90%) and WhatsApp (53.52%) were used in half of all assessments. Passive use of social media (66.21% of all assessments) was more common than active use (50.86%), both on Instagram (48.48% vs. 20.79%) and WhatsApp (51.25% vs. 40.07%).

Strong positive between-person correlations were found between the duration of active and passive social media use (overall: r  = 0.69, p  < 0.001; Instagram: r  = 0.38, p  < 0.01; WhatsApp: r  = 0.85, p  < 0.001): Adolescents who had spent more time actively using social media than their peers, had also spent more time passively using social media than their peers. Likewise, strong positive within-person correlations were found between the duration of active and passive social media use (overall: r  = 0.63, p  < 0.001; Instagram: r  = 0.37, p  < 0.001; WhatsApp: r  = 0.57, p  < 0.001): The more time an adolescent had spent actively using social media at a certain moment, the more time s/he had also spent passively using social media at that moment.

Table 1 displays the average number of minutes that adolescents had spent using social media in the past hour at each assessment, and the zero-order between- and within-person correlations between the duration of social media use and well-being. At the between-person level, the duration of active and passive social media use was not associated with well-being: Adolescents who had spent more time actively or passively using social media than their peers did not report significantly higher or lower levels of well-being than their peers. At the within-person level, significant but weak positive correlations were found between the duration of active and passive overall social media use and well-being. This indicates that adolescents felt somewhat better at moments when they had spent more time actively or passively using social media (overall), compared to moments when they had spent less time actively or passively using social media. When looking at specific platforms, a positive correlation was only found for passive WhatsApp use, but not for active WhatsApp use, and not for active and passive Instagram use.

Average and person-specific effects

The within-person associations of social media use with well-being and differences in these associations were tested in a series of multilevel models. We ran separate models for overall social media use (i.e., active use and passive use of adolescents’ three favorite social media platforms, see Table 2 ), Instagram use (see Table 3 ), and WhatsApp use (see Table 4 ). In a first step we examined the average categorical associations for each of these three social media uses using fixed effects models (Models 1A, 3A, and 5A) to investigate whether, on average, adolescents would feel better or worse at moments when they had used social media compared to moments when they had not (i.e., categorical predictors: active use versus no active use, and passive use versus no passive use). In a second step, we examined heterogeneity in the within-person categorical associations by adding random slopes to the fixed effects models (Models 1B, 3B, and 5B). Next, we examined the average dose–response associations using fixed effects models (Models 2A, 4A, and 6A), to investigate whether, on average, adolescents would feel better or worse when they had spent more time using social media (i.e., continuous predictors: duration of active use and duration of passive use). Finally, we examined heterogeneity in the within-person dose–response associations by adding random slopes to the fixed effects models (Models 2B, 4B, and 6B).

Overall social media use.

The model with the categorical predictors (see Table 2 ; Model 1A) showed that, on average, there was no association between overall use and well-being: Adolescents’ well-being did not increase or decrease at moments when they had used social media, either in a passive or active way. However, evidence was found that the association of passive (but not active) social media use with well-being differed from adolescent to adolescent (Model 1B), with effect sizes ranging from − 0.24 to 0.68. For 44.26% of the adolescents the association was non-existent to small (− 0.10 <  r  < 0.10). However, for 45.90% of the adolescents there was a weak (0.10 <  r  < 0.20; 8.20%), moderate (0.20 <  r  < 0.30; 22.95%) or even strong positive ( r  ≥ 0.30; 14.75%) association between overall passive social media use and well-being, and for almost one in ten (9.84%) adolescents there was a weak (− 0.20 <  r  < − 0.10; 6.56%) or moderate negative (− 0.30 <  r  < − 0.20; 3.28%) association.

The model with continuous predictors (Model 2A) showed that, on average, there was a significant dose–response association for active use. At moments when adolescents had used social media, the time they spent actively (but not passively) using social media was positively associated with well-being: Adolescents felt better at moments when they had spent more time sending messages, posting, or sharing something on social media. The associations of the time spent actively and passively using social media with well-being did not differ across adolescents (Model 2B).

Instagram use

As shown in Model 3A in Table 3 , on average, there was a significant categorical association between passive (but not active) Instagram use and well-being: Adolescents experienced an increase in well-being at moments when they had passively used Instagram (i.e., viewing posts/stories of others). Adolescents did not experience an increase or decrease in well-being when they had actively used Instagram. The associations of passive and active Instagram use with well-being did not differ across adolescents (Model 3B).

On average, no significant dose–response association was found for Instagram use (Model 4A): At moments when adolescents had used Instagram, the time adolescents spent using Instagram (either actively or passively) was not associated with their well-being. However, evidence was found that the association of the time spent passively using Instagram differed from adolescent to adolescent (Model 4B), with effect sizes ranging from − 0.48 to 0.27. For most adolescents (73.91%) the association was non-existent to small (− 0.10 <  r  < 0.10), but for almost one in five adolescents (17.39%) there was a weak (0.10 <  r  < 0.20; 10.87%) or moderate (0.20 <  r  < 0.30; 6.52%) positive association, and for almost one in ten adolescents (8.70%) there was a weak (− 0.20 <  r  < − 0.10; 2.17%), moderate (− 0.30 <  r  < − 0.20; 4.35%), or strong ( r  ≤ − 0.30; 2.17%) negative association. Figure  1 illustrates these differences in the dose–response associations.

The dose–response association between passive Instagram use (in minutes per hour) and affective well-being for each individual adolescent (n = 46). Red lines represent significant negative within-person associations, green lines represent significant positive within-person associations, and gray lines represent non-significant within-person associations. A graph was created for each participant who had completed at least 10 assessments. A total of 13 participants were excluded because they had completed less than 10 assessments of passive Instagram use. In addition, one participant was excluded because no graph could be computed, since this participant's passive Instagram use was constant across assessments.

WhatsApp use

As shown in Model 5A in Table 4 , just as for Instagram, we found that, on average, there was a significant categorical association between passive (but not active) WhatsApp use and well-being: Adolescents reported that they felt better at moments when they had passively used WhatsApp (i.e., read WhatsApp messages). For active WhatsApp use, no significant association was found. Also, in line with the results for Instagram use, no differences were found regarding the associations of active and passive WhatsApp use (Model 5B).

In addition, a significant dose–response association was found for passive (but not active) use (Model 6A). At moments when adolescents had used WhatsApp, we found that, on average, the time adolescents spent passively using WhatsApp was positively associated with well-being: Adolescents felt better at moments when they had spent more time reading WhatsApp messages. The time spent actively using WhatsApp was not associated with well-being. No differences were found in the dose–response associations of active and passive WhatsApp use (Model 6B).

This preregistered study investigated adolescents’ unique susceptibility to the effects of social media. We found that the associations of passive (but not active) social media use with well-being differed substantially from adolescent to adolescent, with effect sizes ranging from moderately negative (− 0.24) to strongly positive (0.68). While 44.26% of adolescents did not feel better or worse if they had passively used social media, 45.90% felt better, and a small group felt worse (9.84%). In addition, for Instagram the majority of adolescents (73.91%) did not feel better or worse when they had spent more time viewing post or stories of others, whereas some felt better (17.39%), and others (8.70%) felt worse.

These findings have important implications for social media effects research, and media effects research more generally. For decades, researchers have argued that people differ in their susceptibility to the effects of media 17 , leading to numerous investigations of such differential susceptibility. These investigations have typically focused on moderators, based on variables such as sex, age, or personality. Yet, over the years, studies have shown that such moderators appear to have little power to explain how individuals differ in their susceptibility to media effects, probably because a group-differential approach does not account for the possibility that media users may differ across a range of factors, that are not captured by only one (or a few) investigated moderator variables.

By providing insights into each individual’s unique susceptibility, the findings of this study provide an explanation as to why, up until now, most media effects research has only found small effects. We found that the majority of adolescents do not experience any short-term changes in well-being related to their social media use. And if they do experience any changes, these are more often positive than negative. Because only small subsets of adolescents experience small to moderate changes in well-being, the true effects of social media reported in previous studies have probably been diluted across heterogeneous samples of individuals that differ in their susceptibility to media effects (also see 30 ). Several scholars have noted that overall effect sizes may mask more subtle individual differences 14 , 15 , which may explain why previous studies have typically reported small or no effects of social media on well-being or indicators of well-being 6 , 11 , 12 , 13 . The current study seems to confirm this assumption, by showing that while the overall effect sizes are small at best, the person-specific effect sizes vary considerably, from tiny and small to moderate and strong.

As called upon by other scholars 5 , 31 , we disentangled the associations of active and passive use of social media. Research among young adults found that passive (but not active) social media use is associated with lower levels of affective well-being 29 . In line with these findings, the current study shows that active and passive use yielded different associations with adolescents’ affective well-being. Interestingly though, in contrast to previous findings among adults, our study showed that, on average, passive use of Instagram and WhatsApp seemed to enhance rather than decrease adolescents’ well-being. This discrepancy in findings may be attributed to the fact that different mechanisms might be involved. Verduyn and colleagues 29 found that passive use of Facebook undermines adults’ well-being by enhancing envy, which may also explain the decreases in well-being found in our study among a small group of adolescents. Yet, adolescents who felt better by passively using Instagram and WhatsApp, might have felt so because they experienced enjoyment. After all, adolescents often seek positive content on social media, such as humorous posts or memes 32 . Also, research has shown that adolescents mainly receive positive feedback on social media 33 . Hence, their passive Instagram and WhatsApp use may involve the reading of positive feedback, which may explain the increases in well-being.

Overall, the time spent passively using WhatsApp improved adolescents’ well-being. This did not differ from adolescent to adolescent. However, the associations of the time spent passively using Instagram with well-being did differ from adolescent to adolescent. This discrepancy suggests that not all social media uses yield person-specific effects on well-being. A possible explanation may be that adolescents’ responses to WhatsApp are more homogenous than those to Instagram. WhatsApp is a more private platform, which is mostly used for one-to-one communication with friends and acquaintances 26 . Instagram, in contrast, is a more public platform, which allows its users to follow a diverse set of people, ranging from best friends to singers, actors, and influencers 28 , and to engage in intimate communication as well as self-presentation and social comparison. Such diverse uses could lead to more varied, or even opposing responses, such as envy versus inspiration.

Limitations and directions for future research

The current study extends our understanding of differential susceptibility to media effects, by revealing that the effect of social media use on well-being differs from adolescent to adolescent. The findings confirm our assumption that among the great majority of adolescents, social media use is unrelated to well-being, but that among a small subset, social media use is either related to decreases or increases in well-being. It must be noted, however, that participants in this study felt relatively happy, overall. Studies with more vulnerable samples, consisting of clinical samples or youth with lower social-emotional well-being may elicit different patterns of effects 27 . Also, the current study focused on affective well-being, operationalized as happiness. It is plausible that social media use relates differently with other types of well-being, such as cognitive well-being. An important next step is to identify which adolescents are particularly susceptible to experience declines in well-being. It is conceivable, for instance, that the few adolescents who feel worse when they use social media are the ones who receive negative feedback on social media 33 .

In addition, future ESM studies into the effects of social media should attempt to include one or more follow-up measures to improve our knowledge of the longer-term influence of social media use on affective well-being. While a week-long ESM is very common and applied in most earlier ESM studies 34 , a week is only a snapshot of adolescent development. Research is needed that investigates whether the associations of social media use with adolescents’ momentary affective well-being may cumulate into long-lasting consequences. Such investigations could help clarify whether adolescents who feel bad in the short term would experience more negative consequences in the long term, and whether adolescents who feel better would be more resistant to developing long-term negative consequences. And while most adolescents do not seem to experience any short-term increases or decreases in well-being, more research is needed to investigate whether these adolescents may experience a longer-term impact of social media.

While the use of different platforms may be differently associated with well-being, different types of use may also yield different effects. Although the current study distinguished between active and passive use of social media, future research should further differentiate between different activities. For instance, because passive use entails many different activities, from reading private messages (e.g., WhatsApp messages, direct messages on Instagram) to browsing a public feed (e.g., scrolling through posts on Instagram), research is needed that explores the unique effects of passive public use and passive private use. Research that seeks to explore the nuances in adolescents’ susceptibility as well as the nuances in their social media use may truly improve our understanding of the effects of social media use.

Participants

Participants were recruited via a secondary school in the south of the Netherlands. Our preregistered sampling plan set a target sample size of 100 adolescents. We invited adolescents from six classrooms to participate in the study. The final sample consisted of 63 adolescents (i.e., 42% consent rate, which is comparable to other ESM studies among adolescents; see, for instance 35 , 36 ). Informed consent was obtained from all participants and their parents. On average, participants were 15 years old ( M  = 15.12 years, SD  = 0.51) and 54% were girls. All participants self-identified as Dutch, and 41.3% were enrolled in the prevocational secondary education track, 25.4% in the intermediate general secondary education track, and 33.3% in the academic preparatory education track.

The study was approved by the Ethics Review Board of the Faculty of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Amsterdam and was performed in accordance with the guidelines formulated by the Ethics Review Board. The study consisted of two phases: A baseline survey and a personalized week-long experience sampling (ESM) study. In phase 1, researchers visited the school during school hours. Researchers informed the participants of the objective and procedure of the study and assured them that their responses would be treated confidentially. Participants were asked to sign the consent form. Next, participants completed a 15-min baseline survey. The baseline survey included questions about demographics and assessed which social media each adolescent used most frequently, allowing to personalize the social media questions presented during the ESM study in phase 2. After completing the baseline survey, participants were provided detailed instructions about phase 2.

In phase 2, which took place two and a half weeks after the baseline survey, a 7-day ESM study was conducted, following the guidelines for ESM studies provided by van Roekel and colleagues 34 . Aiming for at least 30 assessments per participant and based on an average compliance rate of 70 to 80% reported in earlier ESM studies among adolescents 34 , we asked each participant to complete a total of 42 ESM surveys (i.e., six 2-min surveys per day). Participants completed the surveys using their own mobile phone, on which the ESM software application Ethica Data was installed during the instruction session with the researchers (phase 1). Each 2-min survey consisted of 22 questions, which assessed adolescents’ well-being and social media use. Two open-ended questions were added to the final survey of the day, which asked about adolescents’ most pleasant and most unpleasant events of the day.

The ESM sampling scheme was semi-random, to allow for randomization and avoid structural patterns in well-being, while taking into account that adolescents were not allowed to use their phone during school time. The Ethica Data app was programmed to generate six beep notifications per day at random time points within a fixed time interval that was tailored to the school’s schedule: before school time (1 beep), during school breaks (2 beeps), and after school time (3 beeps). During the weekend, the beeps were generated during the morning (1 beep), afternoon (3 beeps), and evening (2 beeps). To maximize compliance, a 30-min time window was provided to complete each survey. This time window was extended to one hour for the first survey (morning) and two hours for the final survey (evening) to account for travel time to school and time spent on evening activities. The average compliance rate was 83.2%. A total of 2,155 ESM assessments were collected: Participants completed an average of 34.83 surveys ( SD  = 4.91) on a total of 42 surveys, which is high compared to previous ESM studies among adolescents 34 .

The questions of the ESM study were personalized based on the responses to the baseline survey. During the ESM study, each participant reported on his/her use of three different social media platforms: WhatsApp and either Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, and/or the chat function of games (i.e., the most popular social media platforms among adolescents 28 ). Questions about Instagram and WhatsApp use were only included if the participant had indicated in the baseline survey that s/he used these platforms at least once a week. If a participant had indicated that s/he used Instagram or WhatsApp (or both) less than once a week, s/he was asked to report on the use of Snapchat, YouTube, or the chat function of games, depending on what platform s/he used at least once a week. In addition to Instagram and WhatsApp, questions were asked about a third platform, that was selected based on how frequently the participant used Snapchat, YouTube, or the chat function of games (i.e., at least once a week). This resulted in five different combinations of three platforms: Instagram, WhatsApp, and Snapchat (47 participants); Instagram, WhatsApp, and YouTube (11 participants); Instagram, WhatsApp, and chatting via games (2 participants); WhatsApp, Snapchat, and YouTube (1 participant); and WhatsApp, YouTube, and chatting via games (2 participants).

Frequency of social media use

In the baseline survey, participants were asked to indicate how often they used and checked Instagram, WhatsApp, Snapchat, YouTube, and the chat function of games, using response options ranging from 1 ( never ) to 7 ( more than 12 times per day ). These platforms are the five most popular platforms among Dutch 14- and 15-year-olds 28 . Participants’ responses were used to select the three social media platforms that were assessed in the personalized ESM study.

Duration of social media use

In the ESM study, duration of active and passive social media use was measured by asking participants how much time in the past hour they had spent actively and passively using each of the three platforms that were included in the personalized ESM surveys. Response options ranged from 0 to 60 min , with 5-min intervals. To measure active Instagram use, participants indicated how much time in the past hour they had spent (a) “posting on your feed or sharing something in your story on Instagram” and (b) “sending direct messages/chatting on Instagram.” These two items were summed to create the variable duration of active Instagram use. Sum scores exceeding 60 min (only 0.52% of all assessments) were recoded to 60 min. To measure duration of passive Instagram use, participants indicated how much time in the past hour they had spent “viewing posts/stories of others on Instagram.” To measure the use of WhatsApp, Snapchat, YouTube and game-based chatting, we asked participants how much time they had spent “sending WhatsApp messages” (active use) and “reading WhatsApp messages” (passive use); “sending snaps/messages or sharing something in your story on Snapchat” (active use) and “viewing snaps/stories/messages from others on Snapchat” (passive use); “posting YouTube clips” (active use) and “watching YouTube clips” (passive use); “sending messages via the chat function of a game/games” (active use) and “reading messages via the chat function of a game/games” (passive use). Duration of active and passive overall social media use were created by summing the responses across the three social media platforms for active and passive use, respectively. Sum scores exceeding 60 min (2.13% of all assessments for active overall use; 2.90% for passive overall use) were recoded to 60 min. The duration variables were used to investigate whether the time spent actively or passively using social media was associated with well-being (dose–response associations).

Use/no use of social media

Based on the duration variables, we created six dummy variables, one for active and one for passive overall social media use, one for active and one for passive Instagram use, and one for active and one for passive WhatsApp use (0 =  no active use and 1 =  active use , and 0 =  no passive use and 1 =  passive use , respectively). These dummy variables were used to investigate whether the use of social media, irrespective of the duration of use, was associated with well-being (categorical associations).

Consistent with previous ESM studies 19 , 20 , we measured affective well-being using one item, asking “How happy do you feel right now?” at each assessment. Adolescents indicated their response to the question using a 7-point scale ranging from 1 ( not at all ) to 7 ( completely ), with 4 ( a little ) as the midpoint. Convergent validity of this item was established in a separate pilot ESM study among 30 adolescents conducted by the research team of the fourth author: The affective well-being item was strongly correlated with the presence of positive affect and absence of negative affect (assessed by a 10-item positive and negative affect schedule for children; PANAS-C) at both the between-person (positive affect: r  = 0.88, p < 0.001; negative affect: r  = − 0.62, p < 0.001) and within-person level (positive affect: r  = 0.74, p < 0.001; negative affect: r  = − 0.58, p < 0.001).

Statistical analyses

Before conducting the analyses, several validation checks were performed (see 34 ). First, we aimed to only include participants in the analyses who had completed more than 33% of all ESM assessments (i.e., at least 14 assessments). Next, we screened participants’ responses to the open questions for unserious responses (e.g., gross comments, jokes). And finally, we inspected time series plots for patterns in answering tendencies. Since all participants completed more than 33% of all ESM assessments, and no inappropriate responses or low-quality data patterns were detected, all participants were included in the analyses.

Following our preregistered analysis plan, we tested the proposed associations in a series of multilevel models. Before doing so, we tested the homoscedasticity and linearity assumptions for multilevel analyses 37 . Inspection of standardized residual plots indicated that the data met these assumptions (plots are available on OSF at  https://osf.io/nhks2 ). We specified separate models for overall social media use, use of Instagram, and use of WhatsApp. To investigate to what extent adolescents’ well-being would vary depending on whether they had actively or passively used social media/Instagram/WhatsApp or not during the past hour (categorical associations), we tested models including the dummy variables as predictors (active use versus no active use, and passive use versus no passive use; models 1, 3, and 5). To investigate whether, at moments when adolescents had used social media/Instagram/WhatsApp during the past hour, their well-being would vary depending on the duration of social media/Instagram/WhatsApp use (dose–response associations), we tested models including the duration variables as predictors (duration of active use and duration of passive use; models 2, 4, and 6). In order to avoid negative skew in the duration variables, we only included assessments during which adolescents had used social media in the past hour (overall, Instagram, or WhatsApp, respectively), either actively or passively. All models included well-being as outcome variable. Since multilevel analyses allow to include all available data for each individual, no missing data were imputed and no data points were excluded.

We used a model building approach that involved three steps. In the first step, we estimated an intercept-only model to assess the relative amount of between- and within-person variance in affective well-being. We estimated a three-level model in which repeated momentary assessments (level 1) were nested within adolescents (level 2), who, in turn, were nested within classrooms (level 3). However, because the between-classroom variance in affective well-being was small (i.e., 0.4% of the variance was explained by differences between classes), we proceeded with estimating two-level (instead of three-level) models, with repeated momentary assessments (level 1) nested within adolescents (level 2).

In the second step, we assessed the within-person associations of well-being with (a) overall active and passive social media use (i.e., the total of the three platforms), (b) active and passive use of Instagram, and (c) active and passive use of WhatsApp, by adding fixed effects to the model (Models 1A-6A). To facilitate the interpretation of the associations and control for the effects of time, a covariate was added that controlled for the n th assessment of the study week (instead of the n th assessment of the day, as preregistered). This so-called detrending is helpful to interpret within-person associations as correlated fluctuations beyond other changes in social media use and well-being 38 . In order to obtain within-person estimates, we person-mean centered all predictors 38 . Significance of the fixed effects was determined using the Wald test.

In the third and final step, we assessed heterogeneity in the within-person associations by adding random slopes to the models (Models 1B-6B). Significance of the random slopes was determined by comparing the fit of the fixed effects model with the fit of the random effects model, by performing the Satorra-Bentler scaled chi-square test 39 and by comparing the Bayesian information criterion (BIC 40 ) and Akaike information criterion (AIC 41 ) of the models. When the random effects model had a significantly better fit than the fixed effects model (i.e., pointing at significant heterogeneity), variance components were inspected to investigate whether heterogeneity existed in the association of either active or passive use. Next, when evidence was found for significant heterogeneity, we computed person-specific effect sizes, based on the random effect models, to investigate what percentages of adolescents experienced better well-being, worse well-being, and no changes in well-being. In line with Keijsers and colleagues 42 we only included participants who had completed at least 10 assessments. In addition, for the dose–response associations, we constructed graphical representations of the person-specific slopes, based on the person-specific effect sizes, using the xyplot function from the lattice package in R 43 .

Three improvements were made to our original preregistered plan. First, rather than estimating the models with multilevel modelling in R 43 , we ran the preregistered models in Mplus 44 . Mplus provides standardized estimates for the fixed effects models, which offers insight into the effect sizes. This allowed us to compare the relative strength of the associations of passive versus active use with well-being. Second, instead of using the maximum likelihood estimator, we used the maximum likelihood estimator with robust standard errors (MLR), which are robust to non-normality. Sensitivity tests, uploaded on OSF ( https://osf.io/nhks2 ), indicated that the results were almost identical across the two software packages and estimation approaches. Third, to improve the interpretation of the results and make the scales of the duration measures of social media use and well-being more comparable, we transformed the social media duration scores (0 to 60 min) into scales running from 0 to 6, so that an increase of 1 unit reflects 10 min of social media use. The model estimates were unaffected by this transformation.

Reporting summary

Further information on the research design is available in the Nature Research Reporting Summary linked to this article.

Data availability

The dataset generated and analysed during the current study is available in Figshare 45 . The preregistration of the design, sampling and analysis plan, and the analysis scripts used to analyse the data for this paper are available online on the Open Science Framework website ( https://osf.io/nhks2 ).

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Acknowledgements

This study was funded by the NWO Spinoza Prize and the Gravitation grant (NWO Grant 024.001.003; Consortium on Individual Development) awarded to P.M.V. by the Dutch Research Council (NWO). Additional funding was received from the VIDI grant (NWO VIDI Grant 452.17.011) awarded to L.K. by the Dutch Research Council (NWO). The authors would like to thank Savannah Boele (Tilburg University) for providing her pilot ESM results.

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I.B., J.L.P., I.I.v.D., L.K., and P.M.V. designed the study; I.B., J.L.P., and I.I.v.D. collected the data; I.B., J.L.P., and L.K. analyzed the data; and I.B., J.L.P., I.I.v.D., L.K., and P.M.V. contributed to writing and reviewing the manuscript.

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Beyens, I., Pouwels, J.L., van Driel, I.I. et al. The effect of social media on well-being differs from adolescent to adolescent. Sci Rep 10 , 10763 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-67727-7

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Research trends in social media addiction and problematic social media use: A bibliometric analysis

Alfonso pellegrino.

1 Sasin School of Management, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand

Alessandro Stasi

2 Business Administration Division, Mahidol University International College, Mahidol University, Nakhon Pathom, Thailand

Veera Bhatiasevi

Associated data.

The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/supplementary material, further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding authors.

Despite their increasing ubiquity in people's lives and incredible advantages in instantly interacting with others, social media's impact on subjective well-being is a source of concern worldwide and calls for up-to-date investigations of the role social media plays in mental health. Much research has discovered how habitual social media use may lead to addiction and negatively affect adolescents' school performance, social behavior, and interpersonal relationships. The present study was conducted to review the extant literature in the domain of social media and analyze global research productivity during 2013–2022. Bibliometric analysis was conducted on 501 articles that were extracted from the Scopus database using the keywords social media addiction and problematic social media use. The data were then uploaded to VOSviewer software to analyze citations, co-citations, and keyword co-occurrences. Volume, growth trajectory, geographic distribution of the literature, influential authors, intellectual structure of the literature, and the most prolific publishing sources were analyzed. The bibliometric analysis presented in this paper shows that the US, the UK, and Turkey accounted for 47% of the publications in this field. Most of the studies used quantitative methods in analyzing data and therefore aimed at testing relationships between variables. In addition, the findings in this study show that most analysis were cross-sectional. Studies were performed on undergraduate students between the ages of 19–25 on the use of two social media platforms: Facebook and Instagram. Limitations as well as research directions for future studies are also discussed.

Introduction

Social media generally refers to third-party internet-based platforms that mainly focus on social interactions, community-based inputs, and content sharing among its community of users and only feature content created by their users and not that licensed from third parties ( 1 ). Social networking sites such as Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok are prominent examples of social media that allow people to stay connected in an online world regardless of geographical distance or other obstacles ( 2 , 3 ). Recent evidence suggests that social networking sites have become increasingly popular among adolescents following the strict policies implemented by many countries to counter the COVID-19 pandemic, including social distancing, “lockdowns,” and quarantine measures ( 4 ). In this new context, social media have become an essential part of everyday life, especially for children and adolescents ( 5 ). For them such media are a means of socialization that connect people together. Interestingly, social media are not only used for social communication and entertainment purposes but also for sharing opinions, learning new things, building business networks, and initiate collaborative projects ( 6 ).

Among the 7.91 billion people in the world as of 2022, 4.62 billion active social media users, and the average time individuals spent using the internet was 6 h 58 min per day with an average use of social media platforms of 2 h and 27 min ( 7 ). Despite their increasing ubiquity in people's lives and the incredible advantages they offer to instantly interact with people, an increasing number of studies have linked social media use to negative mental health consequences, such as suicidality, loneliness, and anxiety ( 8 ). Numerous sources have expressed widespread concern about the effects of social media on mental health. A 2011 report by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) identifies a phenomenon known as Facebook depression which may be triggered “when preteens and teens spend a great deal of time on social media sites, such as Facebook, and then begin to exhibit classic symptoms of depression” ( 9 ). Similarly, the UK's Royal Society for Public Health (RSPH) claims that there is a clear evidence of the relationship between social media use and mental health issues based on a survey of nearly 1,500 people between the ages of 14–24 ( 10 ). According to some authors, the increase in usage frequency of social media significantly increases the risks of clinical disorders described (and diagnosed) as “Facebook depression,” “fear of missing out” (FOMO), and “social comparison orientation” (SCO) ( 11 ). Other risks include sexting ( 12 ), social media stalking ( 13 ), cyber-bullying ( 14 ), privacy breaches ( 15 ), and improper use of technology. Therefore, social media's impact on subjective well-being is a source of concern worldwide and calls for up-to-date investigations of the role social media plays with regard to mental health ( 8 ). Many studies have found that habitual social media use may lead to addiction and thus negatively affect adolescents' school performance, social behavior, and interpersonal relationships ( 16 – 18 ). As a result of addiction, the user becomes highly engaged with online activities motivated by an uncontrollable desire to browse through social media pages and “devoting so much time and effort to it that it impairs other important life areas” ( 19 ).

Given these considerations, the present study was conducted to review the extant literature in the domain of social media and analyze global research productivity during 2013–2022. The study presents a bibliometric overview of the leading trends with particular regard to “social media addiction” and “problematic social media use.” This is valuable as it allows for a comprehensive overview of the current state of this field of research, as well as identifies any patterns or trends that may be present. Additionally, it provides information on the geographical distribution and prolific authors in this area, which may help to inform future research endeavors.

In terms of bibliometric analysis of social media addiction research, few studies have attempted to review the existing literature in the domain extensively. Most previous bibliometric studies on social media addiction and problematic use have focused mainly on one type of screen time activity such as digital gaming or texting ( 20 ) and have been conducted with a focus on a single platform such as Facebook, Instagram, or Snapchat ( 21 , 22 ). The present study adopts a more comprehensive approach by including all social media platforms and all types of screen time activities in its analysis.

Additionally, this review aims to highlight the major themes around which the research has evolved to date and draws some guidance for future research directions. In order to meet these objectives, this work is oriented toward answering the following research questions:

• (1) What is the current status of research focusing on social media addiction?
• (2) What are the key thematic areas in social media addiction and problematic use research?
• (3) What is the intellectual structure of social media addiction as represented in the academic literature?
• (4) What are the key findings of social media addiction and problematic social media research?
• (5) What possible future research gaps can be identified in the field of social media addiction?

These research questions will be answered using bibliometric analysis of the literature on social media addiction and problematic use. This will allow for an overview of the research that has been conducted in this area, including information on the most influential authors, journals, countries of publication, and subject areas of study. Part 2 of the study will provide an examination of the intellectual structure of the extant literature in social media addiction while Part 3 will discuss the research methodology of the paper. Part 4 will discuss the findings of the study followed by a discussion under Part 5 of the paper. Finally, in Part 7, gaps in current knowledge about this field of research will be identified.

Literature review

Social media addiction research context.

Previous studies on behavioral addictions have looked at a lot of different factors that affect social media addiction focusing on personality traits. Although there is some inconsistency in the literature, numerous studies have focused on three main personality traits that may be associated with social media addiction, namely anxiety, depression, and extraversion ( 23 , 24 ).

It has been found that extraversion scores are strongly associated with increased use of social media and addiction to it ( 25 , 26 ). People with social anxiety as well as people who have psychiatric disorders often find online interactions extremely appealing ( 27 ). The available literature also reveals that the use of social media is positively associated with being female, single, and having attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), or anxiety ( 28 ).

In a study by Seidman ( 29 ), the Big Five personality traits were assessed using Saucier's ( 30 ) Mini-Markers Scale. Results indicated that neurotic individuals use social media as a safe place for expressing their personality and meet belongingness needs. People affected by neurosis tend to use online social media to stay in touch with other people and feel better about their social lives ( 31 ). Narcissism is another factor that has been examined extensively when it comes to social media, and it has been found that people who are narcissistic are more likely to become addicted to social media ( 32 ). In this case users want to be seen and get “likes” from lots of other users. Longstreet and Brooks ( 33 ) did a study on how life satisfaction depends on how much money people make. Life satisfaction was found to be negatively linked to social media addiction, according to the results. When social media addiction decreases, the level of life satisfaction rises. But results show that in lieu of true-life satisfaction people use social media as a substitute (for temporary pleasure vs. longer term happiness).

Researchers have discovered similar patterns in students who tend to rank high in shyness: they find it easier to express themselves online rather than in person ( 34 , 35 ). With the use of social media, shy individuals have the opportunity to foster better quality relationships since many of their anxiety-related concerns (e.g., social avoidance and fear of social devaluation) are significantly reduced ( 36 , 37 ).

Problematic use of social media

The amount of research on problematic use of social media has dramatically increased since the last decade. But using social media in an unhealthy manner may not be considered an addiction or a disorder as this behavior has not yet been formally categorized as such ( 38 ). Although research has shown that people who use social media in a negative way often report negative health-related conditions, most of the data that have led to such results and conclusions comprise self-reported data ( 39 ). The dimensions of excessive social media usage are not exactly known because there are not enough diagnostic criteria and not enough high-quality long-term studies available yet. This is what Zendle and Bowden-Jones ( 40 ) noted in their own research. And this is why terms like “problematic social media use” have been used to describe people who use social media in a negative way. Furthermore, if a lot of time is spent on social media, it can be hard to figure out just when it is being used in a harmful way. For instance, people easily compare their appearance to what they see on social media, and this might lead to low self-esteem if they feel they do not look as good as the people they are following. According to research in this domain, the extent to which an individual engages in photo-related activities (e.g., taking selfies, editing photos, checking other people's photos) on social media is associated with negative body image concerns. Through curated online images of peers, adolescents face challenges to their self-esteem and sense of self-worth and are increasingly isolated from face-to-face interaction.

To address this problem the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V) has been used by some scholars ( 41 , 42 ). These scholars have used criteria from the DSM-V to describe one problematic social media use, internet gaming disorder, but such criteria could also be used to describe other types of social media disorders. Franchina et al. ( 43 ) and Scott and Woods ( 44 ), for example, focus their attention on individual-level factors (like fear of missing out) and family-level factors (like childhood abuse) that have been used to explain why people use social media in a harmful way. Friends-level factors have also been explored as a social well-being measurement to explain why people use social media in a malevolent way and demonstrated significant positive correlations with lower levels of friend support ( 45 ). Macro-level factors have also been suggested, such as the normalization of surveillance ( 46 ) and the ability to see what people are doing online ( 47 ). Gender and age seem to be highly associated to the ways people use social media negatively. Particularly among girls, social media use is consistently associated with mental health issues ( 41 , 48 , 49 ), an association more common among older girls than younger girls ( 46 , 48 ).

Most studies have looked at the connection between social media use and its effects (such as social media addiction) and a number of different psychosomatic disorders. In a recent study conducted by Vannucci and Ohannessian ( 50 ), the use of social media appears to have a variety of effects “on psychosocial adjustment during early adolescence, with high social media use being the most problematic.” It has been found that people who use social media in a harmful way are more likely to be depressed, anxious, have low self-esteem, be more socially isolated, have poorer sleep quality, and have more body image dissatisfaction. Furthermore, harmful social media use has been associated with unhealthy lifestyle patterns (for example, not getting enough exercise or having trouble managing daily obligations) as well as life threatening behaviors such as illicit drug use, excessive alcohol consumption and unsafe sexual practices ( 51 , 52 ).

A growing body of research investigating social media use has revealed that the extensive use of social media platforms is correlated with a reduced performance on cognitive tasks and in mental effort ( 53 ). Overall, it appears that individuals who have a problematic relationship with social media or those who use social media more frequently are more likely to develop negative health conditions.

Social media addiction and problematic use systematic reviews

Previous studies have revealed the detrimental impacts of social media addiction on users' health. A systematic review by Khan and Khan ( 20 ) has pointed out that social media addiction has a negative impact on users' mental health. For example, social media addiction can lead to stress levels rise, loneliness, and sadness ( 54 ). Anxiety is another common mental health problem associated with social media addiction. Studies have found that young adolescents who are addicted to social media are more likely to suffer from anxiety than people who are not addicted to social media ( 55 ). In addition, social media addiction can also lead to physical health problems, such as obesity and carpal tunnel syndrome a result of spending too much time on the computer ( 22 ).

Apart from the negative impacts of social media addiction on users' mental and physical health, social media addiction can also lead to other problems. For example, social media addiction can lead to financial problems. A study by Sharif and Yeoh ( 56 ) has found that people who are addicted to social media tend to spend more money than those who are not addicted to social media. In addition, social media addiction can also lead to a decline in academic performance. Students who are addicted to social media are more likely to have lower grades than those who are not addicted to social media ( 57 ).

Research methodology

Bibliometric analysis.

Merigo et al. ( 58 ) use bibliometric analysis to examine, organize, and analyze a large body of literature from a quantitative, objective perspective in order to assess patterns of research and emerging trends in a certain field. A bibliometric methodology is used to identify the current state of the academic literature, advance research. and find objective information ( 59 ). This technique allows the researchers to examine previous scientific work, comprehend advancements in prior knowledge, and identify future study opportunities.

To achieve this objective and identify the research trends in social media addiction and problematic social media use, this study employs two bibliometric methodologies: performance analysis and science mapping. Performance analysis uses a series of bibliometric indicators (e.g., number of annual publications, document type, source type, journal impact factor, languages, subject area, h-index, and countries) and aims at evaluating groups of scientific actors on a particular topic of research. VOSviewer software ( 60 ) was used to carry out the science mapping. The software is used to visualize a particular body of literature and map the bibliographic material using the co-occurrence analysis of author, index keywords, nations, and fields of publication ( 61 , 62 ).

Data collection

After picking keywords, designing the search strings, and building up a database, the authors conducted a bibliometric literature search. Scopus was utilized to gather exploration data since it is a widely used database that contains the most comprehensive view of the world's research output and provides one of the most effective search engines. If the research was to be performed using other database such as Web Of Science or Google Scholar the authors may have obtained larger number of articles however they may not have been all particularly relevant as Scopus is known to have the most widest and most relevant scholar search engine in marketing and social science. A keyword search for “social media addiction” OR “problematic social media use” yielded 553 papers, which were downloaded from Scopus. The information was gathered in March 2022, and because the Scopus database is updated on a regular basis, the results may change in the future. Next, the authors examined the titles and abstracts to see whether they were relevant to the topics treated. There were two common grounds for document exclusion. First, while several documents emphasized the negative effects of addiction in relation to the internet and digital media, they did not focus on social networking sites specifically. Similarly, addiction and problematic consumption habits were discussed in relation to social media in several studies, although only in broad terms. This left a total of 511 documents. Articles were then limited only to journal articles, conference papers, reviews, books, and only those published in English. This process excluded 10 additional documents. Then, the relevance of the remaining articles was finally checked by reading the titles, abstracts, and keywords. Documents were excluded if social networking sites were only mentioned as a background topic or very generally. This resulted in a final selection of 501 research papers, which were then subjected to bibliometric analysis (see Figure 1 ).

Preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analysis (PRISMA) flowchart showing the search procedures used in the review.

After identifying 501 Scopus files, bibliographic data related to these documents were imported into an Excel sheet where the authors' names, their affiliations, document titles, keywords, abstracts, and citation figures were analyzed. These were subsequently uploaded into VOSViewer software version 1.6.8 to begin the bibliometric review. Descriptive statistics were created to define the whole body of knowledge about social media addiction and problematic social media use. VOSViewer was used to analyze citation, co-citation, and keyword co-occurrences. According to Zupic and Cater ( 63 ), co-citation analysis measures the influence of documents, authors, and journals heavily cited and thus considered influential. Co-citation analysis has the objective of building similarities between authors, journals, and documents and is generally defined as the frequency with which two units are cited together within the reference list of a third article.

The implementation of social media addiction performance analysis was conducted according to the models recently introduced by Karjalainen et al. ( 64 ) and Pattnaik ( 65 ). Throughout the manuscript there are operational definitions of relevant terms and indicators following a standardized bibliometric approach. The cumulative academic impact (CAI) of the documents was measured by the number of times they have been cited in other scholarly works while the fine-grained academic impact (FIA) was computed according to the authors citation analysis and authors co-citation analysis within the reference lists of documents that have been specifically focused on social media addiction and problematic social media use.

Results of the study presented here include the findings on social media addiction and social media problematic use. The results are presented by the foci outlined in the study questions.

Volume, growth trajectory, and geographic distribution of the literature

After performing the Scopus-based investigation of the current literature regarding social media addiction and problematic use of social media, the authors obtained a knowledge base consisting of 501 documents comprising 455 journal articles, 27 conference papers, 15 articles reviews, 3 books and 1 conference review. The included literature was very recent. As shown in Figure 2 , publication rates started very slowly in 2013 but really took off in 2018, after which publications dramatically increased each year until a peak was reached in 2021 with 195 publications. Analyzing the literature published during the past decade reveals an exponential increase in scholarly production on social addiction and its problematic use. This might be due to the increasingly widespread introduction of social media sites in everyday life and the ubiquitous diffusion of mobile devices that have fundamentally impacted human behavior. The dip in the number of publications in 2022 is explained by the fact that by the time the review was carried out the year was not finished yet and therefore there are many articles still in press.

Annual volume of social media addiction or social media problematic use ( n = 501).

The geographical distribution trends of scholarly publications on social media addiction or problematic use of social media are highlighted in Figure 3 . The articles were assigned to a certain country according to the nationality of the university with whom the first author was affiliated with. The figure shows that the most productive countries are the USA (92), the U.K. (79), and Turkey ( 63 ), which combined produced 236 articles, equal to 47% of the entire scholarly production examined in this bibliometric analysis. Turkey has slowly evolved in various ways with the growth of the internet and social media. Anglo-American scholarly publications on problematic social media consumer behavior represent the largest research output. Yet it is interesting to observe that social networking sites studies are attracting many researchers in Asian countries, particularly China. For many Chinese people, social networking sites are a valuable opportunity to involve people in political activism in addition to simply making purchases ( 66 ).

Global dispersion of social networking sites in relation to social media addiction or social media problematic use.

Analysis of influential authors

This section analyses the high-impact authors in the Scopus-indexed knowledge base on social networking sites in relation to social media addiction or problematic use of social media. It provides valuable insights for establishing patterns of knowledge generation and dissemination of literature about social networking sites relating to addiction and problematic use.

Table 1 acknowledges the top 10 most highly cited authors with the highest total citations in the database.

Highly cited authors on social media addiction and problematic use ( n = 501).

a Total link strength indicates the number of publications in which an author occurs.

Table 1 shows that MD Griffiths (sixty-five articles), CY Lin (twenty articles), and AH Pakpour (eighteen articles) are the most productive scholars according to the number of Scopus documents examined in the area of social media addiction and its problematic use . If the criteria are changed and authors ranked according to the overall number of citations received in order to determine high-impact authors, the same three authors turn out to be the most highly cited authors. It should be noted that these highly cited authors tend to enlist several disciplines in examining social media addiction and problematic use. Griffiths, for example, focuses on behavioral addiction stemming from not only digital media usage but also from gambling and video games. Lin, on the other hand, focuses on the negative effects that the internet and digital media can have on users' mental health, and Pakpour approaches the issue from a behavioral medicine perspective.

Intellectual structure of the literature

In this part of the paper, the authors illustrate the “intellectual structure” of the social media addiction and the problematic use of social media's literature. An author co-citation analysis (ACA) was performed which is displayed as a figure that depicts the relations between highly co-cited authors. The study of co-citation assumes that strongly co-cited authors carry some form of intellectual similarity ( 67 ). Figure 4 shows the author co-citation map. Nodes represent units of analysis (in this case scholars) and network ties represent similarity connections. Nodes are sized according to the number of co-citations received—the bigger the node, the more co-citations it has. Adjacent nodes are considered intellectually similar.

Two clusters, representing the intellectual structure of the social media and its problematic use literature.

Scholars belonging to the green cluster (Mental Health and Digital Media Addiction) have extensively published on medical analysis tools and how these can be used to heal users suffering from addiction to digital media, which can range from gambling, to internet, to videogame addictions. Scholars in this school of thought focus on the negative effects on users' mental health, such as depression, anxiety, and personality disturbances. Such studies focus also on the role of screen use in the development of mental health problems and the increasing use of medical treatments to address addiction to digital media. They argue that addiction to digital media should be considered a mental health disorder and treatment options should be made available to users.

In contrast, scholars within the red cluster (Social Media Effects on Well Being and Cyberpsychology) have focused their attention on the effects of social media toward users' well-being and how social media change users' behavior, focusing particular attention on the human-machine interaction and how methods and models can help protect users' well-being. Two hundred and two authors belong to this group, the top co-cited being Andreassen (667 co-citations), Pallasen (555 co-citations), and Valkenburg (215 co-citations). These authors have extensively studied the development of addiction to social media, problem gambling, and internet addiction. They have also focused on the measurement of addiction to social media, cyberbullying, and the dark side of social media.

Most influential source title in the field of social media addiction and its problematic use

To find the preferred periodicals in the field of social media addiction and its problematic use, the authors have selected 501 articles published in 263 journals. Table 2 gives a ranked list of the top 10 journals that constitute the core publishing sources in the field of social media addiction research. In doing so, the authors analyzed the journal's impact factor, Scopus Cite Score, h-index, quartile ranking, and number of publications per year.

Top 10 most cited and more frequently mentioned documents in the field of social media addiction.

The journal Addictive Behaviors topped the list, with 700 citations and 22 publications (4.3%), followed by Computers in Human Behaviors , with 577 citations and 13 publications (2.5%), Journal of Behavioral Addictions , with 562 citations and 17 publications (3.3%), and International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction , with 502 citations and 26 publications (5.1%). Five of the 10 most productive journals in the field of social media addiction research are published by Elsevier (all Q1 rankings) while Springer and Frontiers Media published one journal each.

Documents citation analysis identified the most influential and most frequently mentioned documents in a certain scientific field. Andreassen has received the most citations among the 10 most significant papers on social media addiction, with 405 ( Table 2 ). The main objective of this type of studies was to identify the associations and the roles of different variables as predictors of social media addiction (e.g., ( 19 , 68 , 69 )). According to general addiction models, the excessive and problematic use of digital technologies is described as “being overly concerned about social media, driven by an uncontrollable motivation to log on to or use social media, and devoting so much time and effort to social media that it impairs other important life areas” ( 27 , 70 ). Furthermore, the purpose of several highly cited studies ( 31 , 71 ) was to analyse the connections between young adults' sleep quality and psychological discomfort, depression, self-esteem, and life satisfaction and the severity of internet and problematic social media use, since the health of younger generations and teenagers is of great interest this may help explain the popularity of such papers. Despite being the most recent publication Lin et al.'s work garnered more citations annually. The desire to quantify social media addiction in individuals can also help explain the popularity of studies which try to develop measurement scales ( 42 , 72 ). Some of the highest-ranked publications are devoted to either the presentation of case studies or testing relationships among psychological constructs ( 73 ).

Keyword co-occurrence analysis

The research question, “What are the key thematic areas in social media addiction literature?” was answered using keyword co-occurrence analysis. Keyword co-occurrence analysis is conducted to identify research themes and discover keywords. It mainly examines the relationships between co-occurrence keywords in a wide variety of literature ( 74 ). In this approach, the idea is to explore the frequency of specific keywords being mentioned together.

Utilizing VOSviewer, the authors conducted a keyword co-occurrence analysis to characterize and review the developing trends in the field of social media addiction. The top 10 most frequent keywords are presented in Table 3 . The results indicate that “social media addiction” is the most frequent keyword (178 occurrences), followed by “problematic social media use” (74 occurrences), “internet addiction” (51 occurrences), and “depression” (46 occurrences). As shown in the co-occurrence network ( Figure 5 ), the keywords can be grouped into two major clusters. “Problematic social media use” can be identified as the core theme of the green cluster. In the red cluster, keywords mainly identify a specific aspect of problematic social media use: social media addiction.

Frequency of occurrence of top 10 keywords.

Keywords co-occurrence map. Threshold: 5 co-occurrences.

The results of the keyword co-occurrence analysis for journal articles provide valuable perspectives and tools for understanding concepts discussed in past studies of social media usage ( 75 ). More precisely, it can be noted that there has been a large body of research on social media addiction together with other types of technological addictions, such as compulsive web surfing, internet gaming disorder, video game addiction and compulsive online shopping ( 76 – 78 ). This field of research has mainly been directed toward teenagers, middle school students, and college students and university students in order to understand the relationship between social media addiction and mental health issues such as depression, disruptions in self-perceptions, impairment of social and emotional activity, anxiety, neuroticism, and stress ( 79 – 81 ).

The findings presented in this paper show that there has been an exponential increase in scholarly publications—from two publications in 2013 to 195 publications in 2021. There were 45 publications in 2022 at the time this study was conducted. It was interesting to observe that the US, the UK, and Turkey accounted for 47% of the publications in this field even though none of these countries are in the top 15 countries in terms of active social media penetration ( 82 ) although the US has the third highest number of social media users ( 83 ). Even though China and India have the highest number of social media users ( 83 ), first and second respectively, they rank fifth and tenth in terms of publications on social media addiction or problematic use of social media. In fact, the US has almost double the number of publications in this field compared to China and almost five times compared to India. Even though East Asia, Southeast Asia, and South Asia make up the top three regions in terms of worldwide social media users ( 84 ), except for China and India there have been only a limited number of publications on social media addiction or problematic use. An explanation for that could be that there is still a lack of awareness on the negative consequences of the use of social media and the impact it has on the mental well-being of users. More research in these regions should perhaps be conducted in order to understand the problematic use and addiction of social media so preventive measures can be undertaken.

From the bibliometric analysis, it was found that most of the studies examined used quantitative methods in analyzing data and therefore aimed at testing relationships between variables. In addition, many studies were empirical, aimed at testing relationships based on direct or indirect observations of social media use. Very few studies used theories and for the most part if they did they used the technology acceptance model and social comparison theories. The findings presented in this paper show that none of the studies attempted to create or test new theories in this field, perhaps due to the lack of maturity of the literature. Moreover, neither have very many qualitative studies been conducted in this field. More qualitative research in this field should perhaps be conducted as it could explore the motivations and rationales from which certain users' behavior may arise.

The authors found that almost all the publications on social media addiction or problematic use relied on samples of undergraduate students between the ages of 19–25. The average daily time spent by users worldwide on social media applications was highest for users between the ages of 40–44, at 59.85 min per day, followed by those between the ages of 35–39, at 59.28 min per day, and those between the ages of 45–49, at 59.23 per day ( 85 ). Therefore, more studies should be conducted exploring different age groups, as users between the ages of 19–25 do not represent the entire population of social media users. Conducting studies on different age groups may yield interesting and valuable insights to the field of social media addiction. For example, it would be interesting to measure the impacts of social media use among older users aged 50 years or older who spend almost the same amount of time on social media as other groups of users (56.43 min per day) ( 85 ).

A majority of the studies tested social media addiction or problematic use based on only two social media platforms: Facebook and Instagram. Although Facebook and Instagram are ranked first and fourth in terms of most popular social networks by number of monthly users, it would be interesting to study other platforms such as YouTube, which is ranked second, and WhatsApp, which is ranked third ( 86 ). Furthermore, TikTok would also be an interesting platform to study as it has grown in popularity in recent years, evident from it being the most downloaded application in 2021, with 656 million downloads ( 87 ), and is ranked second in Q1 of 2022 ( 88 ). Moreover, most of the studies focused only on one social media platform. Comparing different social media platforms would yield interesting results because each platform is different in terms of features, algorithms, as well as recommendation engines. The purpose as well as the user behavior for using each platform is also different, therefore why users are addicted to these platforms could provide a meaningful insight into social media addiction and problematic social media use.

Lastly, most studies were cross-sectional, and not longitudinal, aiming at describing results over a certain point in time and not over a long period of time. A longitudinal study could better describe the long-term effects of social media use.

This study was conducted to review the extant literature in the field of social media and analyze the global research productivity during the period ranging from 2013 to 2022. The study presents a bibliometric overview of the leading trends with particular regard to “social media addiction” and “problematic social media use.” The authors applied science mapping to lay out a knowledge base on social media addiction and its problematic use. This represents the first large-scale analysis in this area of study.

A keyword search of “social media addiction” OR “problematic social media use” yielded 553 papers, which were downloaded from Scopus. After performing the Scopus-based investigation of the current literature regarding social media addiction and problematic use, the authors ended up with a knowledge base consisting of 501 documents comprising 455 journal articles, 27 conference papers, 15 articles reviews, 3 books, and 1 conference review.

The geographical distribution trends of scholarly publications on social media addiction or problematic use indicate that the most productive countries were the USA (92), the U.K. (79), and Turkey ( 63 ), which together produced 236 articles. Griffiths (sixty-five articles), Lin (twenty articles), and Pakpour (eighteen articles) were the most productive scholars according to the number of Scopus documents examined in the area of social media addiction and its problematic use. An author co-citation analysis (ACA) was conducted which generated a layout of social media effects on well-being and cyber psychology as well as mental health and digital media addiction in the form of two research literature clusters representing the intellectual structure of social media and its problematic use.

The preferred periodicals in the field of social media addiction and its problematic use were Addictive Behaviors , with 700 citations and 22 publications, followed by Computers in Human Behavior , with 577 citations and 13 publications, and Journal of Behavioral Addictions , with 562 citations and 17 publications. Keyword co-occurrence analysis was used to investigate the key thematic areas in the social media literature, as represented by the top three keyword phrases in terms of their frequency of occurrence, namely, “social media addiction,” “problematic social media use,” and “social media addiction.”

This research has a few limitations. The authors used science mapping to improve the comprehension of the literature base in this review. First and foremost, the authors want to emphasize that science mapping should not be utilized in place of established review procedures, but rather as a supplement. As a result, this review can be considered the initial stage, followed by substantive research syntheses that examine findings from recent research. Another constraint stems from how 'social media addiction' is defined. The authors overcame this limitation by inserting the phrase “social media addiction” OR “problematic social media use” in the search string. The exclusive focus on SCOPUS-indexed papers creates a third constraint. The SCOPUS database has a larger number of papers than does Web of Science although it does not contain all the publications in a given field.

Although the total body of literature on social media addiction is larger than what is covered in this review, the use of co-citation analyses helped to mitigate this limitation. This form of bibliometric study looks at all the publications listed in the reference list of the extracted SCOPUS database documents. As a result, a far larger dataset than the one extracted from SCOPUS initially has been analyzed.

The interpretation of co-citation maps should be mentioned as a last constraint. The reason is that the procedure is not always clear, so scholars must have a thorough comprehension of the knowledge base in order to make sense of the result of the analysis ( 63 ). This issue was addressed by the authors' expertise, but it remains somewhat subjective.

Implications

The findings of this study have implications mainly for government entities and parents. The need for regulation of social media addiction is evident when considering the various risks associated with habitual social media use. Social media addiction may lead to negative consequences for adolescents' school performance, social behavior, and interpersonal relationships. In addition, social media addiction may also lead to other risks such as sexting, social media stalking, cyber-bullying, privacy breaches, and improper use of technology. Given the seriousness of these risks, it is important to have regulations in place to protect adolescents from the harms of social media addiction.

Regulation of social media platforms

One way that regulation could help protect adolescents from the harms of social media addiction is by limiting their access to certain websites or platforms. For example, governments could restrict adolescents' access to certain websites or platforms during specific hours of the day. This would help ensure that they are not spending too much time on social media and are instead focusing on their schoolwork or other important activities.

Another way that regulation could help protect adolescents from the harms of social media addiction is by requiring companies to put warning labels on their websites or apps. These labels would warn adolescents about the potential risks associated with excessive use of social media.

Finally, regulation could also require companies to provide information about how much time each day is recommended for using their website or app. This would help adolescents make informed decisions about how much time they want to spend on social media each day. These proposed regulations would help to protect children from the dangers of social media, while also ensuring that social media companies are more transparent and accountable to their users.

Parental involvement in adolescents' social media use

Parents should be involved in their children's social media use to ensure that they are using these platforms safely and responsibly. Parents can monitor their children's online activity, set time limits for social media use, and talk to their children about the risks associated with social media addiction.

Education on responsible social media use

Adolescents need to be educated about responsible social media use so that they can enjoy the benefits of these platforms while avoiding the risks associated with addiction. Education on responsible social media use could include topics such as cyber-bullying, sexting, and privacy breaches.

Research directions for future studies

A content analysis was conducted to answer the fifth research questions “What are the potential research directions for addressing social media addiction in the future?” The study reveals that there is a lack of screening instruments and diagnostic criteria to assess social media addiction. Validated DSM-V-based instruments could shed light on the factors behind social media use disorder. Diagnostic research may be useful in order to understand social media behavioral addiction and gain deeper insights into the factors responsible for psychological stress and psychiatric disorders. In addition to cross-sectional studies, researchers should also conduct longitudinal studies and experiments to assess changes in users' behavior over time ( 20 ).

Another important area to examine is the role of engagement-based ranking and recommendation algorithms in online habit formation. More research is required to ascertain how algorithms determine which content type generates higher user engagement. A clear understanding of the way social media platforms gather content from users and amplify their preferences would lead to the development of a standardized conceptualization of social media usage patterns ( 89 ). This may provide a clearer picture of the factors that lead to problematic social media use and addiction. It has been noted that “misinformation, toxicity, and violent content are inordinately prevalent” in material reshared by users and promoted by social media algorithms ( 90 ).

Additionally, an understanding of engagement-based ranking models and recommendation algorithms is essential in order to implement appropriate public policy measures. To address the specific behavioral concerns created by social media, legislatures must craft appropriate statutes. Thus, future qualitative research to assess engagement based ranking frameworks is extremely necessary in order to provide a broader perspective on social media use and tackle key regulatory gaps. Particular emphasis must be placed on consumer awareness, algorithm bias, privacy issues, ethical platform design, and extraction and monetization of personal data ( 91 ).

From a geographical perspective, the authors have identified some main gaps in the existing knowledge base that uncover the need for further research in certain regions of the world. Accordingly, the authors suggest encouraging more studies on internet and social media addiction in underrepresented regions with high social media penetration rates such as Southeast Asia and South America. In order to draw more contributions from these countries, journals with high impact factors could also make specific calls. This would contribute to educating social media users about platform usage and implement policy changes that support the development of healthy social media practices.

The authors hope that the findings gathered here will serve to fuel interest in this topic and encourage other scholars to investigate social media addiction in other contexts on newer platforms and among wide ranges of sample populations. In light of the rising numbers of people experiencing mental health problems (e.g., depression, anxiety, food disorders, and substance addiction) in recent years, it is likely that the number of papers related to social media addiction and the range of countries covered will rise even further.

Data availability statement

Author contributions.

AP took care of bibliometric analysis and drafting the paper. VB took care of proofreading and adding value to the paper. AS took care of the interpretation of the findings. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher's note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

The Defining Characteristics of Ethics Papers on Social Media Research: A Systematic Review of the Literature

• Published: 06 November 2023
• Volume 22 , pages 163–189, ( 2024 )

Cite this article

• Md. Sayeed Al-Zaman   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-1433-7387 1 ,
• Ayushi Khemka   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-1610-3074 2 ,
• Andy Zhang   ORCID: orcid.org/0009-0007-9924-9365 3 &
• Geoffrey Rockwell   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-7430-4742 4  

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The growing significance of social media in research demands new ethical standards and practices. Although a substantial body of literature on social media ethics exists, studies on the ethics of conducting research using social media are scarce. The emergence of new evidence sources, like social media, requires innovative methods and renewed consideration of research ethics. Therefore, we pose the following question: What are the defining characteristics of ethics papers on social media research? Following a modified version of the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) protocol, we analyzed 34 publications based on ten variables: author gender, publication year, region, academic discipline, type, design, methodology, social media platform in focus, positionality statement, and ethical issues. Our findings suggest contemporary social media research ethics primarily reflects the ethical ideals of the Global North, with limited representation from the Global South. Women authors have published more papers than men authors. Previous studies have prioritized ethical concerns such as privacy, informed consent, and anonymity while overlooking researchers’ risks and the ethics of social media sites. We particularly emphasized the lack of researchers’ positionality statements in research. Our findings will pave the way to understanding social media ethics better, especially with the rapid growth of social media research in global scholarship.

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Introduction

This paper systematically reviews the literature on social media research ethics. Denyer and Tranfield ( 2009 ) defined a systematic literature review (SLR) as a methodology that “locates existing studies, selects and evaluates contributions, analyses and synthesizes data, and reports on the evidence in such a way that allows reasonably clear conclusions to be reached about what is known and what is not known” (p. 671).

Many SLRs study different aspects of social media, such as social media marketing (Denyer & Tranfield, 2006 ), psychology of social media use (Zheng & Ling, 2021 ), social media hatred (Matamoros-Fernández & Farkas, 2021 ), and social media use (Tang et al., 2021 ). The growing body of social media literature suggests increasing scholarly interest worldwide in social media data’s convenience and importance.

Social media research differs from traditional research in several ways. Unlike physical research settings, social media exists in the virtual, intangible cyberspace. Also, social media users are prosumers —producers and consumers—of their content. Moreover, social media data is born-digital data that can be analyzed computationally. Large amounts of data, often called big data, can be scraped, stored, and used efficiently for digital research. As research environments transform from traditional to digital, scholars must also transform and rethink research ethics. However, inclusive and detailed ethics guideline for only social media research is scarce. For this reason, we systematically studied previous publications on social media research ethics. Following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis Protocol (PRISMA-P) 2020, we address the following questions:

RQ: What are the characteristics of ethics-related papers on social media research?

RQa: Who publishes, from where and when, on the ethics of social media research?

RQb: What are the main disciplinary categories, types, designs, methods, and platforms?

RQc: What are the positionality statements and ethical issues they discussed?

Our analysis suggests that contemporary social media research ethics represents those of the Global North, leaving the Global South out. We also found that some ethical issues, including positionality, are less discussed and practiced in previous studies. In the next section, we provide some background for our study.

Social Media

Social media has been defined differently across disciplines, including communication and media studies, information science, public relations, and business studies, making its understanding complex (Carr & Hayes, 2015 ). Some papers broadly conceived the idea of social media, mentioning various websites and applications (Aichner & Jacob, 2015 ). At the same time, other works defined it more narrowly, referring to only selected platforms and apps (e.g., social networking sites (SNSs)) as social media (Boyd, 2008 ; Boyd & Ellison, 2007 ; Fuchs, 2014 ).

In their studies, Boyd ( 2008 ) and Boyd and Ellison ( 2007 ) focused on SNSs as the representatives of social media, emphasizing networking and sharing. From these contending views of social media, we can observe some of its defining features: digital technologies and computer-mediated communication; interactivity, sharing, and networking among the users; user-generated content; directionality; and modes of interaction (Carr & Hayes, 2015 ).

Ethics of Social Media Research

At first glance, foundational research ethics texts, like the Belmont Report (NCPHSBBR, 1978 ) and the Declaration of Helsinki (WMA, 1964 ), seem relevant to social media research. Both texts champion ideas of privacy, justice, anonymity, and informed consent, ideas essential to any research.

However, the principles and ethical standards discussed in both reports pose at least three problems regarding social media research. First, humans are the main concern for these ethical standards in medical research. In contrast, humanities research is more likely to incorporate social artifacts than human subjects compared to medical research. Social artifacts are the social-cultural elements humans produce, including communication materials such as books, films, newspapers, and social media content. Taking these into account, we believe that social media content, being publicly available and created voluntarily by users before the study, is free from ethical restraints (Mancosu & Vegetti, 2020 ).

Second, the idea of informed consent stated in the Belmont Report and other successive research ethics guidelines faces a struggle in the age of big data research. Big data research has become responsible for the gradual erosion of informed consent, producing challenges and dilemmas for researchers, participants, and regulators (Andreotta et al., 2021 ; Favaretto et al., 2020 ; Franzke et al., 2020 ). Previous studies from various disciplines also acknowledged and explicated the ethics problem in social media and big data research (Andreotta et al., 2021 ; Chen & Quan-Haase, 2020 ; Favaretto et al., 2020 ; Ferretti et al., 2020 ; Hibbin et al., 2018 ). While researchers think informed consent should be a priority in research, social media and big data research ethics may not be built on and judged by this parameter. Hence, they exempt themselves from ethics restrictions (Favaretto et al., 2020 ). While the discussed guidelines and studies outline the informed consent relating to research ethics, some other national and supranational guidelines, such as the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), include similar ideas but are unrelated to research ethics.

Third, there is a critical lack of positionality statements in previous research (Matamoros-Fernández & Farkas, 2021 ). Positionality identifies the position from which one views and understands the world. More specifically, positionality defines the standpoints of the researchers from which they observe the social reality and the relationships they maintain with social factors and phenomena. Put another way, researchers’ positionality refers to their stances “in relation to the social and political context of the study—the community, the organization or the participant group” (Coghlan & Brydon-Miller, 2014 , p. 1).

Positionality is an integral part of a critical research process. The researchers are a part of the framework, and their ideologies, beliefs, and worldviews influence the process (Jafar, 2018 ). Sometimes positionality is confused with bias . Although little attention has been paid so far in the methodological literature to understanding bias (Hammersley & Gomm, 1997 ), we can define it as prejudice, a harmful and negative proclivity in research. Bias leads to distorted outcomes in research by deliberately hiding a position, whereas positionality is meaningful for research as it attempts to be honest about how our research is shaped through interpretation and representation (Hammersley & Gomm, 1997 ; Jafar, 2018 ). While bias undermines research, positionality identifies its boundaries.

Materials and Method

Literature search, prisma protocol.

This paper systematically reviews the literature on social media research ethics. For this review process, we adapted the PRISMA protocol (Page et al., 2021 ). This protocol, including a 27-item checklist, was first developed in 2015, intending “to facilitate the preparation and reporting of a robust protocol for the systematic review” (Moher et al., 2016 , p. 148). Subsequent publications expanded it to aid mainly life science researchers (Page et al., 2021 ; Shamseer et al., 2015 ). As the present SLR is primarily rooted in humanities and social sciences, we had to modify PRISMA to fit our study. In this process, we reduced some criteria from the checklist that are only relevant to life sciences, such as protocol and registration for health or animal research.

Eligibility Criteria and Data Source

We set a few exclusion and inclusion criteria aligned with our research objectives. First, we sought to analyze publications that dealt with only social media research ethics. Second, we had no gender, regional, disciplinary, publication type, design, and methodological preferences. Third, we set our language preferences only to English. English is the dominant language in today’s academic world and most scholarly outlets and outputs are in English. Again, in our pilot observation, we found little evidence of relevant papers in other languages in our selected databases. Finally, we set our time range from 2004 to 2022, as the most popular social media sites started after 2004. Primarily, we used the Scopus database, which contains 36,377 journals and 11,678 publishers worldwide (Tang et al., 2021 , p. 3), along with the Web of Science database to increase the robustness of our literature search (Laato et al., 2022 ). Both databases are considered the two most comprehensive databases containing mostly high-quality journals and what other researchers are likely to use (Laato et al., 2022 ; Tang et al., 2021 ). While the JSTOR database includes social sciences and humanities literature, we found no exclusive and relevant literature. We conducted our literature search in March 2022.

Search Strategy

For the search, we used the following combination of keywords to search publication titles only: “social media” OR “Facebook” OR “YouTube” OR “WhatsApp” OR “Instagram” OR “WeChat” OR “TikTok” OR “Douyin” OR “QQ” OR “Sina Weibo” OR “Kuaishou” OR “Snapchat” OR “Telegram” OR “Twitter” OR “Reddit” AND “research” AND “ethics.” We determined and built this combination of keywords based on our research question. First, the three major concerns of our review are social media, research, and ethics, making them keywords. Second, we selected the top 14 social media platforms based on their popularity: Facebook (2,910 million [M]), YouTube (2,562 M), WhatsApp (2,000 M), Instagram (1,478 M), WeChat (1,263 M), TikTok (1,000), Douyin (600 M), QQ (574 M), Sina Weibo (573 M), Kuaishou (573 M), Snapchat (557 M), Telegram (550 M), Twitter (436 M), Reddit (430 M) (Statista, 2022 ). In this regard, we embraced a more constricted definition of social media limited to SNSs (Boyd, 2008 ; Boyd & Ellison, 2007 ; Carr & Hayes, 2015 ; Fuchs, 2014 ). Our search keywords seem more comprehensive than similar previous studies that used fewer keywords and social media platforms in their literature search (e.g., Staccini & Lau, 2020 ).

Our search yielded 64 publications: 33 from Scopus and 31 from Web of Science (Fig.  1 ). We compiled these records and their metadata in a single Microsoft Excel file. Afterward, we cleaned these records in four steps based on our initial eligibility criteria. Our final sample included 34 publications.

Flow diagram of this SLR. It was borrowed from Page et al. ( 2021 , p. 5) and modified

Data Analysis

We analyzed the selected publications based on ten predetermined criteria: author’s region, gender, year of publication, discipline, type, design, method, platform focus, positionality statement, and ethical issue. In Table 1 , we described our variables, providing relevant explanations and examples where necessary. We sometimes relied on previous similar reviews for variable selection. For example, Matamoros-Fernández and Farkas ( 2021 ) included location, platform, method, and positionality in their review paper.

Coding and Analysis

We conducted a content analysis containing both quantitative and qualitative insights. We utilized meta-analysis to summarize the data of all variables statistically. Meta-analysis is the statistical analysis of variables of the relevant literature to draw general conclusions (Hedges, 1992 ). For most variables, such as disciplinary category, type, and platform, we relied on inductive coding, a bottom-to-top approach to data analysis. In this technique, coders closely interact with data instead of relying on predefined categories, iteratively read the raw data, and generate codes or extract information (Allen, 2017 ).

At the same time, we deductively coded other variables, including design and gender, meaning we set our categories before information extraction from the publications and then deduced the assigned code. Two authors of this paper coded the data separately and cross-checked each record to maintain the intercoder reliability of the information. After a few discussion sessions, we resolved our disagreements based on mutual consent (O’Connor & Joffe, 2020 ), thus achieving Cohen’s Kappa, κ = 1. Table 2 presents the summaries of the selected papers for this study based on our selected variables.

Publication Year

Despite our time range for publications starting from 2004, the first paper meeting our criteria was published in 2009. The publications seem unequally distributed throughout the period, maintaining no identifiable pattern, and with visible fluctuations. For example, no relevant papers were published in 2011, 2012, 2015, and 2021, and the highest number of papers were published in 2018 and 2020 (20.59%) (Fig.  2 ). Publications increased continuously only between 2015 and 2018 without any decline. A tiny spark in 2022 might be interpreted as a growing interest in social media research ethics, but the previous year (i.e., 2021) lacked any literature. Although the trendline suggests an upward tendency, we cannot confidently predict the future of the publications based on our sample size.

Yearly distributions of the publications

In our analysis, women authors (64.08%) seem to be more productive in this field than men authors (34.95%) (Table 3 ). Only 0.97% of authors we identified as non-binary (Warfield et al., 2019 ). Of the 34 papers, 18 were co-authored by at least one woman and man (e.g., Al Zou’bi et al., 2020 ; Fiesler & Proferes, 2018 ; Golder et al., 2017 ), more than half of the total publications. Ten papers were written by only women authors (e.g., Hibbin et al., 2018 ; Nenadic, 2018 ; Sellers et al., 2020 ), and six were written by only men authors (e.g., Costello et al., 2019 ; Fuchs, 2018 ; Zimmer & Proferes, 2014 ).

Region and Country

From a regional perspective, studies on social media research ethics are primarily from North America ( n  = 16; 44.44%), followed by Europe ( n  = 14; 38.89%) and Oceania ( n  = 4; 11.11%) (Table 4 ). Country-wise, the USA produced the highest number of papers, accounting for 36.84% ( n  = 14) of all publications (Table 5 ). The UK has the second-highest publications share ( n  = 7; 18.42%), followed by Canada and Australia ( n  = 4; 10.53%). While 94.44% ( n  = 32) of the papers are from the Western world, only 5.56% ( n  = 2) are from the rest of the world, indicating a massive intellectual underrepresentation of non-Western countries. Of the two papers with non-Western authors, one was from China (all the authors were Chinese (Chen et al., 2022 ). However, another paper was a collaboration between authors from Jordan and the USA (Al Zou’bi et al., 2020 ). This finding further explicates the limited contributions of non-Western authors, suggesting the dominance of Western authors.

Discipline and Type

Of the four disciplinary categories we identified, most of the publications are from the social sciences ( n  = 22; 43.14%), followed by the life sciences ( n  = 15; 29.41%) (Table 6 ). The arts and humanities ( n  = 5; 9.80%) occupy the bottom of this list, suggesting a lack of scholarship regarding the ethics of social media research in these fields. It is important to mention that some publications are interdisciplinary. For example, studies by Hokke et al. ( 2020 ), Al Zou’bi et al. ( 2020 ), Samuel et al. ( 2018 ), Parsons ( 2019 ), and Hibbin et al. ( 2018 ) covered both life and social sciences. Similarly, some studies, including Zimmer and Proferes ( 2014 ), Fiesler and Proferes ( 2018 ), and Zimmer ( 2010 ), connected computer and social sciences.

We found seven types of publications, with review articles ( n  = 11; 32.35%) being the most common, followed by research articles ( n  = 9; 26.47%) (Table 7 ). Most review articles are narrative reviews, while some are systematic reviews. Other publications are book chapters, conference papers, opinion articles, reports, and editorials: altogether, they comprise 41.17% ( n  = 16) of the total publications.

Design, Method and Platform

More than half of the publications are qualitative ( n  = 19; 55.88%), suggesting the dominance of this sort of research design, while publications with quantitative design ( n  = 8; 23.53%) are less than half the number of qualitative publications (Table 8 ). Interestingly, research designs of 23.53% ( n  = 6) of the publications could not be identified as they are either editorials, reports, or opinion articles. Only 2.94% ( n  = 1) adopted a mixed methods design.

Narrative review ( n  = 9; 25%) secures the top position as a method, while 22.22% of publications did not define any method. As mentioned, these were mostly review articles, opinion articles, and editorials (Table 9 ). Interviews ( n  = 7; 19.44%) were popular as a qualitative method among researchers, occupying the third position in the list.

Literature on social media ethics mainly deals with seven social media platforms: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, LinkedIn, and Sino Weibo (Table 10 ). Most papers discussed Facebook ( n  = 18; 33.96%), followed by Twitter ( n  = 16; 30.19%). Eight papers (15.09%) did not focus on any specific platform.

Ethical Issues and Positionality

We found 13 broad ethical issues the papers discussed with varying importance (Table 12 ). Privacy ( n  = 29; 24.37%) and informed consent ( n  = 25; 21.01%) received the most attention. Only one paper did not discuss any specific ethical issues. Only two papers (5.88%) included a positionality statement (Costello et al., 2019 ; Luka & Millette, 2018 ). One paper discussed the importance of positionality in the research ethics (Costello et al., 2019 ) (Table 11 ), indicating a lack of interest in positionality as an ethical issue.

Discussion and Conclusion

The present SLR followed the PRISMA guideline to review 34 relevant publications on social media research ethics from 2009 to 2022. The objective was to address a broad research question based on ten selected variables.

Our analysis of the authors’ gender revealed that women publish 29.13% more papers on social media research ethics than men. Previous studies examining gender gaps in academic publishing, which are discipline-specific, do not provide any insights into ethics or social media. For instance, Mayer and Rathmann ( 2018 ) reviewed various studies that used different methods, variables, fields, databases, or countries to observe gender gaps in academic publishing. Most results indicate that women publish fewer papers than men. Teele and Thelen ( 2017 ) studied the top ten political science journals and similarly found that women are underrepresented. Schucan Bird ( 2011 ) investigated the research productivity of UK-based social scientists and their gendered proportion in their respective fields. Once again, the results show that women publish fewer journal articles than men. In this regard, the findings of Mayer and Rathmann ( 2018 ) are significant. They studied the research outputs of German psychology professors and found that in addition to the gender gap, it is essential to consider women’s different publication patterns. For example, women are more interested in publishing potentially less prestigious book chapters than articles in competitive journals. Therefore, our study offers novel insights for future research.

As mentioned, most of the publications originated in the Global North. This poses at least two problems. First, Western ethics dominates ethical understandings of social media research, excluding non-Western scholars’ ethical positions. As ethics is culturally relative, Western ethical practices should not be considered universal and the only way to think through ethics. For example, research including human participants (e.g., survey- and interview-based studies) are sometimes published in academic journals in the Global South without ethics approval. By contrast, research conducted in most Western universities require authorization from an IRB before publication if they involve human participants. Similarly, fundamental ethical practices like data privacy and informed consent vary across geographic locations. Therefore, there needs to be a greater diversity of ethical ideas and discussion across cultures if we are to standardize ethical guidelines for social media research confidently. Second, the dominance of Western knowledge related to research ethics reproduces and reinforces the hegemony of Western thought on the subject. This impedes the inclusive democratization of knowledge, which suggests the importance of paying attention to the politics of citation. The discussion is inevitably poorer and limited by Western ethical frameworks and their particular assumptions, histories, and vocabulary. What might other voices of ethics teach?

We found the highest share of publications from the social sciences. Of note, 17 out of 22 papers from social sciences are interdisciplinary, suggesting the multidisciplinary nature of social media research ethics. Arts and humanities remain at the bottom of the list, which suggests a lack of interest in social media research ethics among their researchers. Humanists may be less likely to use contemporary social media as evidence. Many humanists focus on past evidence for which an ethics review is not always necessary. It could also be that the number of humanists working and publishing in research ethics is lower than from the other disciplinary categories.

The higher prevalence of issues surrounding privacy, informed consent, anonymity, and justice in the ethics publications reviewed underscores the enduring relevance of traditional Western research ethics, as anchored in the Belmont Report and the Helsinki Declaration. These ethical concerns are multifaceted, often overlapping with one another. For instance, the concept of privacy encompasses various dimensions, including data privacy, which pertains to information types, collection procedures, utilization, and protection (Nicholas et al., 2020 ). Additionally, information philosophers propose four types of privacy: physical, mental, decisional, and informational (Kisselburgh & Beever, 2022 ). Despite scholarly efforts, framing privacy in the context of digital age research remains challenging due to its dynamic nature, leading to ongoing debates among researchers and leaving ethical dilemmas unresolved.

In relation to privacy, the notion of informed consent has become a subject of debate in the era of big (digital) data research. While some researchers adhere to traditional viewpoints that all data producers must be informed about the use of their data, many are grappling with the evolving nature of research practices and ethics, sometimes setting aside the requirement for informed consent when dealing with large public datasets. Questions arise as to the feasibility of securing informed consent from millions of unknown Twitter users when their data is used for large-scale analysis (Fiesler & Proferes, 2018 ). This raises broader scholarly debates regarding privacy and informed consent, which invariably extend to considerations of anonymity and other ethical concerns. Do researchers need to anonymize such data? Is there a confidentiality issue with this type of data? Some researchers tend to address these questions independently (Luka & Millette, 2018 ; Mancosu & Vegetti, 2020 ), while organizational efforts have been observed in providing guidelines for ethical practices (Franzke et al., 2020 ).

This discussion highlights the intricacies and ongoing debates surrounding privacy, informed consent, anonymity, and other ethical concerns within contemporary research ethics, underscoring the complex nature of ethical decision-making in the digital age. However, apart from the widely discussed ethical concerns, we endorse three important, less-discussed ethical concerns: (a) researchers’ risk, (b) the ethics of social media platforms, and (c) positionality.

Researcher’s Risk

First, despite researchers’ presence in social media research, discussions about researchers’ risk and safety are rare, calling for further scholarly attention. We experienced the risks of studying contemporary phenomena while working on a research project with social media data from the Gamergate community that has harassed academics in the past (Chess & Shaw, 2015 ; Rockwell & Suomela, 2015 ). There are various risks associated with social media research, beyond unwanted attention, such as exposure to toxicity while collecting and analyzing data that may harm researchers’ mental health. Unfortunately, only two papers discussed this topic and not in great detail (Al Zou’bi et al., 2020 ; Johnson et al., 2018 ).

Ethics of Social Media Platforms

Second, only one paper (Golder et al., 2017 ) discussed social media companies’ ethical responsibilities. Different social media platforms have different terms of services, data management and sharing, site administration, and legal issues. For example, some platforms have open data that can be easily accessed through interfaces (e.g., Twitter), while others limit the amount of harvestable data (e.g., Telegram). As research is a form of engagement, we need to take into account the platforms’ position and, in some cases, adapt our own positions. This is essential now with large-scale research datasets like LAION 5B ( https://laion.ai/ ) being used to train AIs that may then be used by researchers.

• Positionality

Third and foremost, positionality should be an integral part of ethics research. The researcher is the only person involved in the research process from beginning to end. Therefore, to evaluate the research outcome, or in these cases, the research ethics positions taken, it is important to know who the researcher is and how they affect the resulting perspectives. Acknowledging positionality is becoming an ethical and ideal practice in the research (D’Ignazio & Klein, 2020 ). For these reasons, we encourage researchers to include a positionality statement of how their identities, experiences, and beliefs might affect the outcomes. No one expects these statements to be exhaustive, but openness aids ethical discussion, making research more engaging and less dominating. Assessing predispositions and standpoints prior to research informs scholars how they themselves might affect the study and adjust parameters accordingly.

Positionality may also be identified by analyzing the researcher’s relation to the topic under investigation, the research participants or data, and the research context and process (A. G. D. Holmes, 2020 ). Previous studies from various disciplines, such as media and communication studies (Deuze, 2021 ), health and medicine (Jafar, 2018 ), political science (Mason-Bish, 2019 ), social science, anthropological studies (C. E. Holmes, 2021 ; Shaw et al., 2020 ), and digital research (Ricker, 2017 ), emphasized and acknowledged researcher’s positionality. Positionality is essential when working with marginalized and vulnerable communities (Shaw et al., 2020 ).

Studies, including Cuthill ( 2015 ), Mason-Bish ( 2019 ), and Shaw et al. ( 2020 ), implied qualitative studies are more likely to include positionality statements. While most of our selected papers followed a qualitative design, we found researchers tended to avoid positionality statements. Only two papers in our sample included positionality statements: one was qualitative (Luka & Millette, 2018 ), while another was quantitative (Costello et al., 2019 ). Positionality statements may not have any relation to the research design. We suggest that researchers state their positions irrespective of their design.

We believe these results will pave the way to understanding social media ethics better, especially with the rapid growth of social media research in global scholarship. This study endeavors to bridge this gap with novel findings. We are also optimistic this study will assist both new and experienced researchers in rethinking ethical social media research. In the next section, we discuss some of the limitations of this research, followed by a discussion of future research directions.

Limitations and Future Research

This research has limitations. First, we used the PRISMA protocol for this paper. It is primarily used in computer and life sciences. The 27-point checklist includes some checks unrelated to the social sciences and humanities. Also, no standard PRISMA protocol exists for other disciplinary categories beyond computer and life sciences. For these reasons, we had to modify the protocol to fit our study.

Second, our research may lack inclusiveness. The publications in our study are from only two databases, and as such, we do not explore others like Google Scholar or EBSCOhost. Though we believe quality over quantity is essential in this sort of research, we recommend that future studies incorporate additional databases. We also excluded non-English publications. As discussed above, we need to engage with different research ethics cultures and their concomitant preferred publishing languages for future studies.

Third, we faced an issue while coding the gender variable. As stated earlier, we noted the gender identity of the authors from their pronoun usage (they/them, she/her, and he/him), extracting this information from the publicly available information about the authors, such as bios and interviews. We acknowledge this method’s limitations in equating gender with pronoun usage, thereby simplifying the complex and layered nature of gender. The pronoun usage is thus an indicative marker rather than a determining one.

Finally, we acknowledge our positionality. We are a research group with diverse backgrounds. Being university-educated brown and white researchers, we acknowledge our epistemic privilege in having our institution situated in the Global North. These intersecting categories and perspectives affect our research process at every step, latently and explicitly. We strived to be mindful of the differences within our group and practice ethics of care to hold space for the diverse experiences that we bring to our group and situate our knowledge production in a robust and nuanced lived academic reality.

By conducting this research, we also observed that researchers might be interested in contributing to some research gaps in this area. Therefore, we conclude by proposing some directions for future research. We found that most papers on social media research ethics come from the Global North. Although our language selection may have contributed to this result, we still wonder if there is any politics of knowledge in this area. Therefore, future research further empirically and more inclusively investigates this phenomenon: What sources and publications do other researchers cite, what countries collaborate more than others, and what institutions dominate others in research outputs? Investigating the factors behind the production disparity between the Global North and the Global South would also be interesting. Studies have already suggested that knowledge diffusion and publication bias favor high-income countries and more prestigious institutions, underrepresenting low-income countries and less prestigious institutions (Skopec et al., 2020 ). We also suspect a similar tendency in publishing on social media research ethics. Finally, we believe all would benefit from cross-cultural research into how research ethics are discussed and practiced in other communities.

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Al-Zaman, M.S., Khemka, A., Zhang, A. et al. The Defining Characteristics of Ethics Papers on Social Media Research: A Systematic Review of the Literature. J Acad Ethics 22 , 163–189 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10805-023-09491-7

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74 Best Social Media Research Paper Topics

Whether in college or high school, you will come across research writing as a student. In most cases, the topic of research is assigned by your teacher/professor. Other times, students have to come up with their topic. Research writing in school is inescapable. It’s a task you are bound to undertake to fulfill your academic requirements. If you are in college, there are several topics for research depending on your discipline. For high school students, the topic is usually given. In this article, we focus on social media and topics about social media.

A social media paper is a research paper about social media that studies social media generally or an aspect of it. To write research papers on social media, you’ll need to conduct thorough research for materials and scholarly materials that’ll assist you. For social media, most of the scholarly works will be media-focused.

Sometimes, Professors or teachers ask students to write an essay or research a topic without narrowing it down. In that case, students will have to develop specific research topics. If you’re writing a paper on social media, we’ve provided you with helpful topics to consider for research.

How to Start a Social Media Research Paper

Social media topics to write about, social media research topics for college students, interesting topics to research for fun, research questions about social media, social media essay topics for high school students, narrow research topic ideas students can consider, research paper on social media marketing, good social topics for research papers, easy social issues to write about, social science research topics for college students, interesting research topics for high school students, comprehensive social networking research papers, final words about social media topics.

Before giving a research writing, Professors and teachers believe students already know how to write one. Not every student knows how to write a research paper in most cases.

Research writing follows a systematic pattern, which applies to research on social media. Below is the pattern of a research paper to use;

• Paper title
• Introduction
• Statement of problem
• Research methodology
• Research objective
• Critical analysis
• Results and discussion

Every research follows this basic pattern, and it also applies to your research paper on social media.

Social media has become a powerful tool for engagement of various kinds. Before now, social media was merely apps used for interpersonal affairs. Today, with the modification of digital technology, social media encompasses a lot more. Below are some social media topics to write about.

• The impact of social media in promoting interpersonal relationships
• A study on how social media is a vital tool for social change
• Social media censorship: A new form of restriction on freedom of speech
• The constantly growing oversharing nature of social media
• Social media is a vital tool for political campaign
• The proliferation of social media platforms into a buying space
• The juxtaposition of personal engagement and business on social media platforms

There is a wide range of topics to coin from social media for college students because social media is a platform with diverse issues that can form into topics. Here are some research topics about social media to consider.

• Breach of Privacy: A study on the ability of the government to monitor personal affairs on social media
• A study of the toxicity brewing within social media
• The increased cyberbullying perpetrated on social media platforms
• The evolution of Twitter into a space for diverse conversations
• A study of the emergence and growth of social media over the years
• Effects of social media: How social media is breeding laziness amongst children
• Social media as a distraction tool for students

If you are searching for interesting topics, there are many interesting research topics on social media. Examples of research paper topics that sound fun to choose from include;

• A study on how the emergence of social media and social media advertising has infiltrated its primary purpose
• An evaluation of how social media has created employment opportunities for people
• Social media influence and its negative impact on society
• Advertising on social media: Will influencer businesses take over advertising agencies?
• A study on ways to improve advertisement for social media engagement
• A look into how social media creates a distorted view of real life
• Social media and real-life: Does social media obscure reality?

Research questions are helpful when carrying out research in a particular field. To know more about your thesis on social media, you will need to create research questions on social media to help inform your writing. Some social media research questions to ask are;

• Are social media platforms designed to be addictive?
• What is a social media Algorithm, and how to navigate it?
• To what extent are personal data stored on social app databases protected?
• Can social media owners avoid government monitoring?
• Should parents allow their children to navigate social media before they are 15?
• Have social media jobs come to stay, or are they temporary?
• Is social media influencer culture overtaking celebrity culture?
• To what extent can social media help to curb racism and homophobia?
• Does social media exacerbate or curb discriminatory practices?
• Is social media an effective tool for learning?

Everyone has access to social media apps until they’ve reached a certain age. There are several social media essay topics for high school students to write about. Some social media titles for essays include;

• How social media affects the academic performance of students
• Why the use of social media is prohibited during school hours
• Why students are obsessed with Tiktok
• Running a profitable social media business while in high school and the challenges
• The dangers of overusing editing apps
• A critical essay on how editing apps and filters promote an unrealistic idea of beauty
• The death of TV: how social media has stolen student’s interest

The challenge students have with their topic ideas for research papers is that they’re broad. A good social media thesis topic should be narrowed down. Narrowing a topic down helps you during research to focus on an issue.

Some narrow social media topics for the research paper include;

• A study of how social media is overtaking Television in entertainment
• A study of how social media has overtaken traditional journalism
• An evaluation of the rise of influencer culture on Instagram
• YouTube and how it has created sustainable income for black content creators
• A comparative study of social media managers and content creators
• A study of the decline of Instagram since the emergence of Tiktok
• How Twitter breeds transphobic conversations

There are several areas of social media to focus your research on. If you are looking for some social media marketing topics, below are some social media research paper topics to consider;

• Influencer culture and a modified model of mouth-to-mouth marketing
• The growth of video marketing on Instagram
• Social media managers as an essential part of online marketing
• A study on how social media stories are optimized for marketing
• An analysis of social media marketing and its impact on customer behavior
• An evaluation of target marketing on social media

There are so many topics to choose from in this aspect. Some social issues research paper topics to explore are;

• The growth of cyberattacks and cyberstalking in social media
• Social media and how it promotes an unrealistic idea of life
• Social media and the many impacts it has on users and businesses
• Social media detox: Importance of taking scheduled social media breaks
• How social media enable conversation on social challenges

Writing a research paper on social issues touches on various areas. Some are challenging, while others are easier to navigate.

Below are some of the easy social issues topics to choose from.

• The growing issue of women’s and trans people’s rights
• Religious bigotry and how it affects social progress
• Sustainable living and why it’s important to the society
• The social impact of climate change and global warming

Social science is a broad discipline. If you are looking for social science essay topics, below are some social science topics for research papers to look into;

• Consumerism and how it’s perpetrated on social media
• How religious beliefs impact social relationships
• Inflation and how it affects the economy of a nation
• A study of the limited availability of work opportunities for minority groups
• A look into the concept of “low wage” jobs

Research writing is not always technical or challenging. Sometimes, it can be fun to write. It all depends on your choice of topic. Below are some topics on social media that are fun to work on;

• The importance of social media branding for small businesses
• A look into the monetization of Instagram
• User engagement and how it can be converted into business leads
• The study of emojis and their role in social media engagement
• From Instagram to Tiktok: the poaching nature of social media apps

Research writing on social media networking studies social networking and its design and promotion on social media platforms. Some research papers on social media networking are;

• The impact of social media networking on business owners
• Social media networking and how it impacts influencer culture
• Social media and how it’s used to build and develop social relationships
• How social media made social networking services easier

Social media research writing is one of the most interesting research to conduct. It cuts across several interesting areas. The writer can handle almost every aspect of the dissertation or thesis statement about social media . But, students who find it challenging should seek professional help. You can reach out to  our expert team of writers to help you handle every element of your writing. We have the best on our team who are always ready to give you their best.

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Research Paper – Structure, Examples and Writing Guide

Table of Contents

Research Paper

Definition:

Research Paper is a written document that presents the author’s original research, analysis, and interpretation of a specific topic or issue.

It is typically based on Empirical Evidence, and may involve qualitative or quantitative research methods, or a combination of both. The purpose of a research paper is to contribute new knowledge or insights to a particular field of study, and to demonstrate the author’s understanding of the existing literature and theories related to the topic.

Structure of Research Paper

The structure of a research paper typically follows a standard format, consisting of several sections that convey specific information about the research study. The following is a detailed explanation of the structure of a research paper:

The title page contains the title of the paper, the name(s) of the author(s), and the affiliation(s) of the author(s). It also includes the date of submission and possibly, the name of the journal or conference where the paper is to be published.

The abstract is a brief summary of the research paper, typically ranging from 100 to 250 words. It should include the research question, the methods used, the key findings, and the implications of the results. The abstract should be written in a concise and clear manner to allow readers to quickly grasp the essence of the research.

Introduction

The introduction section of a research paper provides background information about the research problem, the research question, and the research objectives. It also outlines the significance of the research, the research gap that it aims to fill, and the approach taken to address the research question. Finally, the introduction section ends with a clear statement of the research hypothesis or research question.

Literature Review

The literature review section of a research paper provides an overview of the existing literature on the topic of study. It includes a critical analysis and synthesis of the literature, highlighting the key concepts, themes, and debates. The literature review should also demonstrate the research gap and how the current study seeks to address it.

The methods section of a research paper describes the research design, the sample selection, the data collection and analysis procedures, and the statistical methods used to analyze the data. This section should provide sufficient detail for other researchers to replicate the study.

The results section presents the findings of the research, using tables, graphs, and figures to illustrate the data. The findings should be presented in a clear and concise manner, with reference to the research question and hypothesis.

The discussion section of a research paper interprets the findings and discusses their implications for the research question, the literature review, and the field of study. It should also address the limitations of the study and suggest future research directions.

The conclusion section summarizes the main findings of the study, restates the research question and hypothesis, and provides a final reflection on the significance of the research.

The references section provides a list of all the sources cited in the paper, following a specific citation style such as APA, MLA or Chicago.

How to Write Research Paper

You can write Research Paper by the following guide:

• Choose a Topic: The first step is to select a topic that interests you and is relevant to your field of study. Brainstorm ideas and narrow down to a research question that is specific and researchable.
• Conduct a Literature Review: The literature review helps you identify the gap in the existing research and provides a basis for your research question. It also helps you to develop a theoretical framework and research hypothesis.
• Develop a Thesis Statement : The thesis statement is the main argument of your research paper. It should be clear, concise and specific to your research question.
• Plan your Research: Develop a research plan that outlines the methods, data sources, and data analysis procedures. This will help you to collect and analyze data effectively.
• Collect and Analyze Data: Collect data using various methods such as surveys, interviews, observations, or experiments. Analyze data using statistical tools or other qualitative methods.
• Organize your Paper : Organize your paper into sections such as Introduction, Literature Review, Methods, Results, Discussion, and Conclusion. Ensure that each section is coherent and follows a logical flow.
• Write your Paper : Start by writing the introduction, followed by the literature review, methods, results, discussion, and conclusion. Ensure that your writing is clear, concise, and follows the required formatting and citation styles.
• Edit and Proofread your Paper: Review your paper for grammar and spelling errors, and ensure that it is well-structured and easy to read. Ask someone else to review your paper to get feedback and suggestions for improvement.
• Cite your Sources: Ensure that you properly cite all sources used in your research paper. This is essential for giving credit to the original authors and avoiding plagiarism.

Research Paper Example

Note : The below example research paper is for illustrative purposes only and is not an actual research paper. Actual research papers may have different structures, contents, and formats depending on the field of study, research question, data collection and analysis methods, and other factors. Students should always consult with their professors or supervisors for specific guidelines and expectations for their research papers.

Research Paper Example sample for Students:

Title: The Impact of Social Media on Mental Health among Young Adults

Abstract: This study aims to investigate the impact of social media use on the mental health of young adults. A literature review was conducted to examine the existing research on the topic. A survey was then administered to 200 university students to collect data on their social media use, mental health status, and perceived impact of social media on their mental health. The results showed that social media use is positively associated with depression, anxiety, and stress. The study also found that social comparison, cyberbullying, and FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) are significant predictors of mental health problems among young adults.

Introduction: Social media has become an integral part of modern life, particularly among young adults. While social media has many benefits, including increased communication and social connectivity, it has also been associated with negative outcomes, such as addiction, cyberbullying, and mental health problems. This study aims to investigate the impact of social media use on the mental health of young adults.

Literature Review: The literature review highlights the existing research on the impact of social media use on mental health. The review shows that social media use is associated with depression, anxiety, stress, and other mental health problems. The review also identifies the factors that contribute to the negative impact of social media, including social comparison, cyberbullying, and FOMO.

Methods : A survey was administered to 200 university students to collect data on their social media use, mental health status, and perceived impact of social media on their mental health. The survey included questions on social media use, mental health status (measured using the DASS-21), and perceived impact of social media on their mental health. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and regression analysis.

Results : The results showed that social media use is positively associated with depression, anxiety, and stress. The study also found that social comparison, cyberbullying, and FOMO are significant predictors of mental health problems among young adults.

Discussion : The study’s findings suggest that social media use has a negative impact on the mental health of young adults. The study highlights the need for interventions that address the factors contributing to the negative impact of social media, such as social comparison, cyberbullying, and FOMO.

Conclusion : In conclusion, social media use has a significant impact on the mental health of young adults. The study’s findings underscore the need for interventions that promote healthy social media use and address the negative outcomes associated with social media use. Future research can explore the effectiveness of interventions aimed at reducing the negative impact of social media on mental health. Additionally, longitudinal studies can investigate the long-term effects of social media use on mental health.

Limitations : The study has some limitations, including the use of self-report measures and a cross-sectional design. The use of self-report measures may result in biased responses, and a cross-sectional design limits the ability to establish causality.

Implications: The study’s findings have implications for mental health professionals, educators, and policymakers. Mental health professionals can use the findings to develop interventions that address the negative impact of social media use on mental health. Educators can incorporate social media literacy into their curriculum to promote healthy social media use among young adults. Policymakers can use the findings to develop policies that protect young adults from the negative outcomes associated with social media use.

References :

• Twenge, J. M., & Campbell, W. K. (2019). Associations between screen time and lower psychological well-being among children and adolescents: Evidence from a population-based study. Preventive medicine reports, 15, 100918.
• Primack, B. A., Shensa, A., Escobar-Viera, C. G., Barrett, E. L., Sidani, J. E., Colditz, J. B., … & James, A. E. (2017). Use of multiple social media platforms and symptoms of depression and anxiety: A nationally-representative study among US young adults. Computers in Human Behavior, 69, 1-9.
• Van der Meer, T. G., & Verhoeven, J. W. (2017). Social media and its impact on academic performance of students. Journal of Information Technology Education: Research, 16, 383-398.

Appendix : The survey used in this study is provided below.

Social Media and Mental Health Survey

• How often do you use social media per day?
• Less than 30 minutes
• 30 minutes to 1 hour
• 1 to 2 hours
• 2 to 4 hours
• More than 4 hours
• Which social media platforms do you use?
• Others (Please specify)
• How often do you experience the following on social media?
• Social comparison (comparing yourself to others)
• Cyberbullying
• Fear of Missing Out (FOMO)
• Have you ever experienced any of the following mental health problems in the past month?
• Do you think social media use has a positive or negative impact on your mental health?
• Very positive
• Somewhat positive
• Somewhat negative
• Very negative
• In your opinion, which factors contribute to the negative impact of social media on mental health?
• Social comparison
• In your opinion, what interventions could be effective in reducing the negative impact of social media on mental health?
• Education on healthy social media use
• Counseling for mental health problems caused by social media
• Social media detox programs
• Regulation of social media use

Thank you for your participation!

Applications of Research Paper

Research papers have several applications in various fields, including:

• Advancing knowledge: Research papers contribute to the advancement of knowledge by generating new insights, theories, and findings that can inform future research and practice. They help to answer important questions, clarify existing knowledge, and identify areas that require further investigation.
• Informing policy: Research papers can inform policy decisions by providing evidence-based recommendations for policymakers. They can help to identify gaps in current policies, evaluate the effectiveness of interventions, and inform the development of new policies and regulations.
• Improving practice: Research papers can improve practice by providing evidence-based guidance for professionals in various fields, including medicine, education, business, and psychology. They can inform the development of best practices, guidelines, and standards of care that can improve outcomes for individuals and organizations.
• Educating students : Research papers are often used as teaching tools in universities and colleges to educate students about research methods, data analysis, and academic writing. They help students to develop critical thinking skills, research skills, and communication skills that are essential for success in many careers.
• Fostering collaboration: Research papers can foster collaboration among researchers, practitioners, and policymakers by providing a platform for sharing knowledge and ideas. They can facilitate interdisciplinary collaborations and partnerships that can lead to innovative solutions to complex problems.

When to Write Research Paper

Research papers are typically written when a person has completed a research project or when they have conducted a study and have obtained data or findings that they want to share with the academic or professional community. Research papers are usually written in academic settings, such as universities, but they can also be written in professional settings, such as research organizations, government agencies, or private companies.

Here are some common situations where a person might need to write a research paper:

• For academic purposes: Students in universities and colleges are often required to write research papers as part of their coursework, particularly in the social sciences, natural sciences, and humanities. Writing research papers helps students to develop research skills, critical thinking skills, and academic writing skills.
• For publication: Researchers often write research papers to publish their findings in academic journals or to present their work at academic conferences. Publishing research papers is an important way to disseminate research findings to the academic community and to establish oneself as an expert in a particular field.
• To inform policy or practice : Researchers may write research papers to inform policy decisions or to improve practice in various fields. Research findings can be used to inform the development of policies, guidelines, and best practices that can improve outcomes for individuals and organizations.
• To share new insights or ideas: Researchers may write research papers to share new insights or ideas with the academic or professional community. They may present new theories, propose new research methods, or challenge existing paradigms in their field.

Purpose of Research Paper

The purpose of a research paper is to present the results of a study or investigation in a clear, concise, and structured manner. Research papers are written to communicate new knowledge, ideas, or findings to a specific audience, such as researchers, scholars, practitioners, or policymakers. The primary purposes of a research paper are:

• To contribute to the body of knowledge : Research papers aim to add new knowledge or insights to a particular field or discipline. They do this by reporting the results of empirical studies, reviewing and synthesizing existing literature, proposing new theories, or providing new perspectives on a topic.
• To inform or persuade: Research papers are written to inform or persuade the reader about a particular issue, topic, or phenomenon. They present evidence and arguments to support their claims and seek to persuade the reader of the validity of their findings or recommendations.
• To advance the field: Research papers seek to advance the field or discipline by identifying gaps in knowledge, proposing new research questions or approaches, or challenging existing assumptions or paradigms. They aim to contribute to ongoing debates and discussions within a field and to stimulate further research and inquiry.
• To demonstrate research skills: Research papers demonstrate the author’s research skills, including their ability to design and conduct a study, collect and analyze data, and interpret and communicate findings. They also demonstrate the author’s ability to critically evaluate existing literature, synthesize information from multiple sources, and write in a clear and structured manner.

Characteristics of Research Paper

Research papers have several characteristics that distinguish them from other forms of academic or professional writing. Here are some common characteristics of research papers:

• Evidence-based: Research papers are based on empirical evidence, which is collected through rigorous research methods such as experiments, surveys, observations, or interviews. They rely on objective data and facts to support their claims and conclusions.
• Structured and organized: Research papers have a clear and logical structure, with sections such as introduction, literature review, methods, results, discussion, and conclusion. They are organized in a way that helps the reader to follow the argument and understand the findings.
• Formal and objective: Research papers are written in a formal and objective tone, with an emphasis on clarity, precision, and accuracy. They avoid subjective language or personal opinions and instead rely on objective data and analysis to support their arguments.
• Citations and references: Research papers include citations and references to acknowledge the sources of information and ideas used in the paper. They use a specific citation style, such as APA, MLA, or Chicago, to ensure consistency and accuracy.
• Peer-reviewed: Research papers are often peer-reviewed, which means they are evaluated by other experts in the field before they are published. Peer-review ensures that the research is of high quality, meets ethical standards, and contributes to the advancement of knowledge in the field.
• Objective and unbiased: Research papers strive to be objective and unbiased in their presentation of the findings. They avoid personal biases or preconceptions and instead rely on the data and analysis to draw conclusions.

Advantages of Research Paper

Research papers have many advantages, both for the individual researcher and for the broader academic and professional community. Here are some advantages of research papers:

• Contribution to knowledge: Research papers contribute to the body of knowledge in a particular field or discipline. They add new information, insights, and perspectives to existing literature and help advance the understanding of a particular phenomenon or issue.
• Opportunity for intellectual growth: Research papers provide an opportunity for intellectual growth for the researcher. They require critical thinking, problem-solving, and creativity, which can help develop the researcher’s skills and knowledge.
• Career advancement: Research papers can help advance the researcher’s career by demonstrating their expertise and contributions to the field. They can also lead to new research opportunities, collaborations, and funding.
• Academic recognition: Research papers can lead to academic recognition in the form of awards, grants, or invitations to speak at conferences or events. They can also contribute to the researcher’s reputation and standing in the field.
• Impact on policy and practice: Research papers can have a significant impact on policy and practice. They can inform policy decisions, guide practice, and lead to changes in laws, regulations, or procedures.
• Advancement of society: Research papers can contribute to the advancement of society by addressing important issues, identifying solutions to problems, and promoting social justice and equality.

Limitations of Research Paper

Research papers also have some limitations that should be considered when interpreting their findings or implications. Here are some common limitations of research papers:

• Limited generalizability: Research findings may not be generalizable to other populations, settings, or contexts. Studies often use specific samples or conditions that may not reflect the broader population or real-world situations.
• Potential for bias : Research papers may be biased due to factors such as sample selection, measurement errors, or researcher biases. It is important to evaluate the quality of the research design and methods used to ensure that the findings are valid and reliable.
• Ethical concerns: Research papers may raise ethical concerns, such as the use of vulnerable populations or invasive procedures. Researchers must adhere to ethical guidelines and obtain informed consent from participants to ensure that the research is conducted in a responsible and respectful manner.
• Limitations of methodology: Research papers may be limited by the methodology used to collect and analyze data. For example, certain research methods may not capture the complexity or nuance of a particular phenomenon, or may not be appropriate for certain research questions.
• Publication bias: Research papers may be subject to publication bias, where positive or significant findings are more likely to be published than negative or non-significant findings. This can skew the overall findings of a particular area of research.
• Time and resource constraints: Research papers may be limited by time and resource constraints, which can affect the quality and scope of the research. Researchers may not have access to certain data or resources, or may be unable to conduct long-term studies due to practical limitations.

About the author

Muhammad Hassan

Researcher, Academic Writer, Web developer

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