Social Media Use Research Project

The goal of this project was to better understand how college students understand and interact with social media. This research project took place in two steps. The first was a qualitative study in which we conducted semi-structured interviews using non-probability sampling. This first step lead us to develop the research question, “What is the relationship between mental health and social media usage for college students in the US?” This served as the guiding question in our quantitative study. 

We conducted a survey of 24 questions, which we distributed in an online format to 100 people using convenient sampling. We found that before social media, the majority was neutral about their mental health, and after social media use, the majority leaned towards a decline in mental health. This gave evidence that social media affects a person’s mental health. We then decided to do bivariate analysis. We wanted to investigate the polarization and see what aspects of social media were correlated to mental health.