Student Research Guide SPQ25/ Social Media Addiction and Teenage Health

Social Media Addiction and its Affects on Teenage Mental Health

 This is a student created research guide for English 102 & Library 201 Learning community. This guide was completed in conjunction with a research paper on the same topic for English 102.

This guide will address how social media addiction develops and its affect on a teenagers health and well being.

The research thesis of this guide is to explore the impacts of social media on teenagers. This includes the impact on their communication skills, mental health, physical health, and an adolescences' well being. 

• The research questions addresses in this guide are:

1. How does social media impact teenagers in both a negative and positive way?
2. What is social media addiction and how does it occur?
3. Is there an impact on teenage physical health as a result of social media addiction?
4. What are the mental impacts social media presents in teenagers?

Social media has become part of almost everyone’s day-to-day life. It is a place for people to express their interests, contact and communicate with friends and family, and overall, a place of enjoyment. However, social media has become the source of major issues among teenagers because of overusing it, leading to social media addiction. This research paper is intended to explore the ideas surrounding what can happen because of social media addiction and some of the main symptom’s teenagers may be more likely to experience because of this addiction. The methodology of this paper was examining a wide variety of literature, found within sources including SVC databases, the Pew Research Center, the American Psychological Association, Google Scholar, and other educational university websites. A total of ten websites were compiled and annotated within this research guide. The results and concluding paper indicated that over three hours of social media usage a day among teenagers can result in mental health symptoms such as depression and anxiety, how the actual use of staring at a device can affect one’s body and sleep cycle, and that overall, there is a huge impact on someone’s well-being as in result of social media addiction. Because social media is still a relatively new concept, there is limited research done to determine how much of an effect social media has on one’s mind and body. The implications would be that more research would need to be done to accurately prove how much of an effect social media has on teenagers, as well as the long term affects social media has.

Social media is a very popular creation, with over half of the adults in the "United States claiming they use some form of social media. The definition of social media is, “forms of electronic communication, such as websites for social networking and microblogging, through which users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, and other content, such as videos" The first social media sites created were known as Classmates.com and SixDegrees.com, in which people could create their own profiles with their information, add all their friends, and contact one another with the site’s private communication messaging system.

The chart below is a result of a survey done on teenagers (13-17) to determine how the use of social media can either hurt or help different aspects of their daily life. The results show that a majority of teenagers believe daily social media usage helps their friendships, while also hurting their amount of sleep. This data is important to the research question as it relays how teenagers feel about social media and how the usage of it can affect their daily life as well as some of the impacts of social media.

"Teens, Social Media, and Mental Health." Pew Research Center, 11 April 2025, https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2025/04/22/teens-social-media-and-mental-health/pi_2025-04-22_teens-social-media-mental-health_0-10/.