The Impact of Social Media Usage on Psychological and Social Well-being among Youth: An Empirical Study.

Abstract

The evolving social media has altered the communication trends among youngsters, and the occurrence of this is raising some questions regarding its effects on the psychological and social health of the youth. The proposed study focuses on investigating how social media use, addiction behaviour, and well-being outcomes are related in young people. Quantitative Cross-Sectional Study Design was chosen where there were 110 participants ranging from 18 to 24 years old. The main variables included in the research were the daily average usage time, the addicted score, mental score, sleep time and some conflict social issues. The outcome indicates the negative correlation of social media usage with mental well-being, which means that as social media usage increases, the well-being decreases. Moreover, it was found out that there was a strong association between the addiction of social media and sleep deprivation. Increased use of social media could lead to social conflict among people. From the results, it is evident that the use intensity of social media and the addictive nature are significant in influencing the well-being of young people. Nevertheless, one weakness of the paper includes the small number of participants used as well as the lack of longitudinal design in data collection. However, the paper makes a significant contribution to existing literature because the impact of social media use is discussed from various perspectives.