Student Research Guide WQ24/ Instagram and Mental Health

Does Instagram affect mental health?

Yes. The act of social comparison has lasting effects on the mental health of some of the regular users of Instagram. 

What are the major negative mental health effects?

Depression

Anxiety

Body image issues

 Meta Inc, the parent company of Instagram, has had a lawsuit filed against them in October 2023, by dozens of different states. The lawsuit claims that Meta was aware that they were knowingly exposing adolescents to addictive and damaging content, along with collecting the data of their underaged users and selling it. 

Advice for future researchers:

My advice for future researchers about this topic is to take the time and find credible sources and not just use the first website/article you find. Once you find a good article I looked at the articles/authors they quoted to see if those also helped in my research. If your question you're research is too narrow, broaden it. If you're getting too many hits, narrow it, be more specific with your keywords. 

Reflection on research experience:

The research process was more time consuming than I thought it would be. My original thought was that I could take 10 minutes, plug some keywords into Google and get the information that I needed. Sure, I ended up with a ton of information, but once I started looking into the sources I realized they were not credible sources at all. Sifting through what was credible and what was not took the longest time. Using the SVC databases was very helpful in that sense, because it took out a lot of the legwork. The most interesting part of the process was finding little tidbits of information that were surprising to me and finding ways that I could integrate that into my paper/guide. My interest in Instagram didn't change after doing my research for this guide because I am already a person who doesn't spend much time on it. I have an account, but that account is mostly used for messaging friends and I haven't posted on it since 2018. The research did help me to understand more of the dangers of social media as a whole and what to look out for as my children grow up.