Eoin Whelan

Good morning, David.

Yeah, we had access to a very large data set of about 3,000 teenagers, 15 and 16-year-olds in the west of Ireland.

So what we were interested in looking at was the link between the time they spend on social media and a range of health outcomes.

from well-being to mental health to risk behaviours.

What we found overall is that there is a negative link between the amount of time to spend on social media and health outcomes, but when we look at the strength of that relationship, it's actually quite modest, fairly weak.

Now, this is not to say that we shouldn't be worried about social media for adolescents.

Our study looked at the population across the board, or the average teenager, but of course there is no such thing as an average teenager.

When we drilled down into the data, we did see that there were areas of concern.

So particularly for about 20% of teenage boys, there seemed to be a link between the time to spend on social media and anger management problems.

Now, this is not to say that social media causes them to be angry.

What we think is the case is that whatever is happening in their life, their family life, school life, they might be angry to begin with.

And when they go on social media, they're going in in a stressed state.

And when people are stressed, they generally look for content that makes them feel better, that they look for evidence that people are leading worse lives than themselves.

And of course, the algorithms pick up on this and it keeps them in that loop and feeding them that material over time, toxic content, whatever you want to call it.

So there are concerns, but across the board, maybe, I suppose what we did as well in our study, we compared social media and the health outcomes to a range of other factors that are important in teenagers' lives.

like having a healthy family situation, being feeling safe in school, having access to after-school activities.

We found that social media is down on the list when we look on the factors that are relevant for teenagers and their mental health and well-being.

Yeah, it's a very complex situation that if we, you know, it's very easy to blame social media and smartphones for the ills that teenagers might be experiencing.

But we know across all generations, my generations and before that, roughly about 20% of adolescents, they have struggles.

So, and that was before social media and phones as well.