Permanently Online - Permanently Connected and Fear of Missing Out and their Impact on Mental Health
Type of research: quantitative empirical
Description:
Digital media have yielded great benefits. For example, they help us communicate with others in synchronous and asynchronous ways, collaborate and create bigger projects, and we can be updated with the newest knowledge in real time. However, being always connected, accessible, and overloaded with information can lead to mental health problems, such as stress, anxiety, depression, and can also affect our sleep quality.
Concepts such as Permanently Online, Permanently Connected (POPC) and Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) have emerged to explain these detrimental effects of the exposure to digital media. Unfortunately, it seems that the younger generations are the most affected due to factors such as the normalization of being many hours everyday on digital media, and a trend to constantly share content on media such as Instagram or TikTok.
In this study, we will explore media habits, frequency of use, duration, motivation for using digital media and its impact on mental health and well-being. The study will compare diverse populations to assess which groups are the most affected; therefore, an open survey will be distributed. Assessments such as the Online Vigilance Scale (Reinecke, et al., 2018) will be implemented.
The results of this study will help to understand the usage of digital media by diverse populations to tailor specific future interventions for the most affected groups.
Reference
Reinecke, L., Klimmt, C., Meier, A., Reich, S., Hefner, D., Knop-Huelss, K., . . . Vorderer, P. (2018). Permanently online and permanently connected: Development and validation of the online vigilance scale. PLoS ONE, 13(10) doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0205384
Who are we looking for?
Students with an interest in working with quantitative data.