this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2023
309 points (97.0% liked)

Technology

60082 readers
3879 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
L3s
[email protected]
[email protected]
L4s
enu
309
New study finds small reductions in social media use are linked to improvements in health and well-being (www.psypost.org)
submitted 1 year ago by L4s to c/technology
25 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

New study finds small reductions in social media use are linked to improvements in health and well-being::A study published in the Journal of Technology in Behavioral Science suggests that reducing social media usage by just 15 minutes per day can lead to improved health and well-being, particularly in terms of social life, vitality, and overall health. These findings add to the growing body of research indicating that limiting social media usage can have positive effects. ...

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] br3d 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This is such a common sneer, but it's naive and misguided. In the hope a few people see this, consider a thought experiment: how many students would you have to push off a cliff to get solid evidence that pushing people off a cliff is harmful? The point being that when a phenomenon is powerful, it's quite possible to study it even with small and selective samples.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I get what you mean but please read the study: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41347-023-00304-7

They themselves note that the very small sample size would be an issue. They say they would need 78 people for even remotely confident results, then they initially targeted 74 people, of which 20 dropped out.

Let me be clear that I too want to believe that social networks are bad for people, but studies like this one do very very little to provide any meaningful data to base my opinion on.

[–] br3d 1 points 1 year ago

It's good to look at the original study, but what that tells me is that for the effect to emerge as significant despite the lack of participants, it was quite possibly even larger than the researchers estimated in their power analysis