Lohmann Sophie, Zagheni Emilio
Department of Digital and Computational Demography, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany.
PLOS Digit Health. 2023 Jul 13;2(7):e0000292. doi: 10.1371/journal.pdig.0000292. eCollection 2023 Jul.
Many people engage with a diverse array of social media platforms, raising concerns that this diversity of platforms may be linked to negative affect, hypothesized to arise from multitasking or identify diffusion. Using a large representative sample (N = 1,372) of US adults from the authoritative General Social Survey, we examine associations between social media diversity and well-being and propose a self-selection explanation for these associations. Even without accounting for selection bias, we find few and only small associations. Importantly, after using a rigorous propensity-score weighting technique to adjust for selection bias, these associations disappear. Further, we also document few negative associations between the use of specific social media platforms and well-being. Our findings suggest that (i) diverse social media use is not a major risk factor to adult well-being; (ii) negative correlations reported in the literature may be spurious; (iii) technology use research needs to take self-selection biases seriously.
许多人使用各种各样的社交媒体平台，这引发了人们的担忧，即这种平台的多样性可能与负面影响有关，据推测，这种负面影响源于多任务处理或身份认同扩散。我们使用来自权威的综合社会调查的大量具有代表性的美国成年人样本（N = 1372），研究社交媒体多样性与幸福感之间的关联，并为这些关联提出一种自我选择的解释。即使不考虑选择偏差，我们发现的关联也很少且很微弱。重要的是，在使用严格的倾向得分加权技术来调整选择偏差后，这些关联消失了。此外，我们还记录到特定社交媒体平台的使用与幸福感之间几乎没有负面关联。我们的研究结果表明：（i）多样化的社交媒体使用并非成年人幸福感的主要风险因素；（ii）文献中报道的负相关可能是虚假的；（iii）技术使用研究需要认真对待自我选择偏差。
