Study doesn’t find evidence to link internet access with poorer psychological well-being and mental health

Is the inter­net bad for men­tal health? What the lat­est study real­ly means. (Mash­able):

… Enter a study pub­lished Tues­day by researchers in the jour­nal Clin­i­cal Psy­cho­log­i­cal Sci­ence, which tried but did not suc­ceed in find­ing a com­pelling link between inter­net access and poor men­tal health and well-being.

Busi­ness Insid­er, for exam­ple, declared that the study found no link between social media use and “men­tal health harm.” Except that’s not what the researchers evaluated.

Instead, they con­trast­ed inter­net access in the form of year­ly per capi­ta inter­net and mobile-broad­band sub­scrip­tions and var­i­ous mea­sures of well-being and men­tal health.

They did not, how­ev­er, dis­tin­guish inter­net access from cer­tain types of plat­forms, like social media and gam­ing … In gen­er­al, the researchers did­n’t find a con­vinc­ing link between inter­net access and poor­er well-being and men­tal health. Among young indi­vid­u­als there were some minus­cule pos­i­tive and neg­a­tive cor­re­la­tions between some of the vari­ables, but co-author Dr. Andrew K. Przy­byl­s­ki told Mash­able in an email that those find­ings were hard to inter­pret … “Thought lead­ers and some pol­i­cy folks claim there is a glob­al men­tal health epi­dem­ic caused by the inter­net, but they do not both­er to col­lect [and] wran­gle data to sup­port this extra­or­di­nary claim,” he wrote … “I am sure that tech­nol­o­gy use has its ups and downs, but we’ll nev­er be able to map this out, and inter­vene if nec­es­sary, if we don’t have objec­tive data on how, why, and when peo­ple engage with online worlds,” Przy­byl­s­ki said.

The Study:

Glob­al Well-Being and Men­tal Health in the Inter­net Age (Clin­i­cal Psy­cho­log­i­cal Science).

Abstract: In the last 2 decades, the wide­spread adop­tion of Inter­net tech­nolo­gies has inspired con­cern that they have neg­a­tive­ly affect­ed men­tal health and psy­cho­log­i­cal well-being. How­ev­er, research on the top­ic is con­test­ed and ham­pered by method­olog­i­cal short­com­ings, leav­ing the broad­er con­se­quences of Inter­net adop­tion unknown. We show that the past 2 decades have seen only small and incon­sis­tent changes in glob­al well-being and men­tal health that are not sug­ges­tive of the idea that the adop­tion of Inter­net and mobile broad­band is con­sis­tent­ly linked to neg­a­tive psy­cho­log­i­cal out­comes. Fur­ther inves­ti­ga­tion of this top­ic requires trans­par­ent study of online behav­iors where they occur (i.e., on online plat­forms). We call for increased col­lab­o­ra­tive efforts between inde­pen­dent sci­en­tists and the Inter­net-tech­nol­o­gy sector.

The Study in Context:

• Is the Inter­net Good or Bad for Your Brain?
• Wel­come to the Ulti­mate Neu­ro­science Lab: Your Smartphone