Social Networks and Mental Health

Is there a link between social media use and mental health challenges? We look at a meta-analysis and use some critical thinking to tackle the issue. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the
tech are you? So today I thought I would talk
about something that hits a bit close to home, which

(00:25):
is the relationship between social media, social networks, and mental health.
This is a very complicated topic for a whole bunch
of reasons. I mean, for one thing, just to be
transparent with all of y'all, I'm a gen xer, okay.
I grew up in an era in which there was
a pretty darn hefty stigma attached to all things mental health,

(00:50):
Like if you had mental health struggles, the feeling was
that somehow that was your fault and a failing of
you personally. So to this day, while I recognize the
importance of mental health and seeking help when you're struggling,
like when a friend of mine tells me, oh, I
found this awesome therapist, I'm so happy for them, it's
still a barrier for me, which is screwed up. Like rationally,

(01:13):
I can recognize it as being important, and I can
be happy for my friends to seek that health and
yet I still have the blocks, the mental blocks that
are rock solid when it comes to my own mental health,
which kind of stinks, Like it really stinks when you
are trying to think of things rationally and you still
encounter this because you're like, Okay, some things go beyond rationality.

(01:35):
I have to admit that. But apart from my own
personal reasons, it's a tricky topic because it's really hard
to be definitive about things that relate to mental health.
There are all different types of human beings out there
in the world, and there's stuff that could roll right
off the back of one person but really traumatically impact

(01:56):
someone else, and it often can be really different, dificult
to determine a causal relationship between different factors. Now by that,
I mean there are a ton of studies out there
that have looked into the potential impact of social media
on mental health. For example, a study might find that
people who identify as being depressed or experiencing anxiety might

(02:22):
be spending a lot more time on social media sites
than people who do not identify as that. But does
that mean the social media sites are causing this anxiety
and depression that by staying on these sites that's what's
making people feel anxious and depressed. Or could it mean
that people who are already experiencing anxiety and depression are

(02:45):
seeking out social media sites. You know, maybe that's a
coping mechanism for them. In other words, it's the old
phrase correlation is not causation. Just because two things appear
to happen together doesn't mean that one caused the other.
They could be unrelated. They could both be caused by
the same common factor. We just don't know without looking

(03:07):
into it further. So today I thought, you know what,
I'm going to actually go through one of these studies.
Because I've talked about studies in general, but typically I'm
reading about an article that's written about the study. I'm
not reading the study itself. So I found a study
from twenty twenty that was a sort of meta analysis
on the subject of mental health and social networking sites. Now,

(03:31):
if you are unfamiliar with the term meta analysis, that
is a type of study that looks at the results
of other studies in order to reach some conclusion. So
you might say, all right, let's take these thirty studies
about this one topic. Really look at what the conclusions
are of all of them and see if we can

(03:51):
use that to draw new conclusions. So in this case,
the researchers of this particular study, they identified fifty papers
about social media and mental health using Google scholar. By
the way, when they did the search terms for things
like mental health and social media and social networking, they
came up with tens of thousands of papers. Even with

(04:12):
social media and mental health together, it was like eighteen
thousand papers. From that group, they got fifty, and from
that list of fifty, they paired the list down to
sixteen studies. They had a whole process for reviewing these
papers and determining whether or not they fit within their
own study. And as you can see, with sixteen, that

(04:34):
means fewer than half of those fifty made it through. Eight.
Of those studies that they'd considered. They were cross sectional studies.
That means it's a study where they analyzed data, or
the original researchers analyzed data from a group of subjects
at a single point in time, so it's like a
cross section of time. That made up half of the

(04:55):
papers that they were looking at. Two of the sixteen
were qualitative STUF studies. That means they were looking at
non quantifiable information and trying conclusions from that. So, in
other words, these studies look at stuff like social phenomena,
which you cannot really measure with scientific units. Right, if
you're measuring, like in chemistry, you're using units of like

(05:17):
weight and volume, those are quantifiable. You can put actual
units of measurement to them. If you're saying how happy
is society, that's not really quantifiable. That's qualitative, not quantifiable.
So those were the kinds of studies for two of
the sixteen papers that they chose. It's tricky to do

(05:38):
a qualitative analysis because you're still trying to come to
a scientific conclusion, but you're using unquantifiable factors to do so.
So they get a little whibbly wobbly, and a lot
of this stuff falls into fields like sociology, which, by
the way, I love sociology is one of my favorite
classes when I was in college. But sociology is by

(06:00):
its nature difficult to grow because of a lack of
quantifiable units. Anyway, three of the remaining studies were longitudinal studies.
That means they explored the same list of variables and
how those variables changed over a long period of time.
So this is like if you have a group of
subjects and you are observing them periodically over a long

(06:23):
course like potentially years. The remaining studies were systematic, meaning
they looked at patterns that would indicate cause and effect.
Are there recognizable and reliable patterns so much so that
should you start to see one thing, you would immediately
begin to draw conclusions that a pattern exists, even if

(06:45):
it's not readily evident at the time. One of the
really big challenges of meta analyses is that you have
to try and synthesize the findings of different studies that
are all using totally different methodologies, and you do this
while you're trying to draw your own conclusions. That's pretty
tough because you might accidentally misinterpret findings in an effort

(07:07):
to reach the conclusion you've already made. Or you might
pair two different papers together to say these papers support
one another, but because they're different methodologies, it may not
be as clear as that. Right. If the methods were
totally different, then yeah, the conclusions might be similar, but
you might not be able to say this study supports

(07:28):
this other study because they they took such different pathways
to get there. You can't be sure that they are
actually saying the same thing, and there's bias that you
have to deal with. Everybody has bias, and suppressing bias
is important. It's also really hard to do. Sometimes it's impossible.
You likely are going to have your own bias when
you go into a study, like you might already have

(07:50):
a preconceived idea of something that you're just expecting to prove.
So that will make you pay more attention to the
things that really reinforce your bias and potentially dismiss or
discount things that are not aligned with your bias unless
it gets to a point where it's just overwhelmingly impossible

(08:11):
to ignore. So this gets into things like cherry picking,
right where you're cherry picking the points of data that
support your perspective or your argument. Now, I'm not saying
that all meta analyzes are bad. I'm just saying they're
tricky to do and they're easy to do poorly, So
they're not bad just out of the gate, but they

(08:34):
are hard to do well. And obviously your conclusions are
only as reliable as the individual studies are. Like, you
could do a fantastic meta analysis, but if all the
studies that are part of your meta analysis are crap,
then the results of your meta analysis aren't reliable either.
Garbage in, garbage out kind of thing. So that's why

(08:55):
that selection process was important. So while they only use
six out of fifty papers that they selected out of
a larger like eighteen thousand potential papers, you can at
least say, well, they had a process there to try
and weed out things that would either be a bad
fit or were poorly designed. So this paper, I haven't
even mentioned the title yet. Here's the title. You can

(09:17):
look this up and read it yourself. It's social Media
Use and its Connection to Mental health, a systematic review.
And this was by a collection of authors. There's like
six or seven authors attached to this. I found it
by using the National Library of Medicine when I was
looking for a paper to talk about, and it was

(09:38):
originally published in a web based peer reviewed medical journal
called Curious. Now let's cur eus. We're going to get
to the paper in a second, and I'll also have
more to say about Curious at the end of this episode, because,
as it turns out, Curious has its own curious reputation.
I'm not saying it's a bad paper, but I am

(10:00):
saying like it is a matter of debate among the
research circle, and yeah, I kind of tripped into that
one without anticipating it. So first, before we get to
the actual paper, I think it is important to establish
the connection between socialization in general and mental health. Human
beings are social animals, even though some days I feel

(10:22):
like I should just run off to be a hermit
in the woods. Some days, y'all, that compulsion is a
strong one. So in a different scientific paper by Deborah
Umberson and Jennifer carraz Montez title Social Relationships and Health
a Flashpoint for Health Policy, there is a very powerful
statement that I wanted to share. Quote Captors use social

(10:45):
isolation to torture prisoners of war to drastic effect. Social
isolation of otherwise healthy, well functioning individuals eventually results in
psychological and physical disintegration and even death. In quote, that
is a heck of a way to argue for the
power of socialization, because when we are deprived of socialization,

(11:08):
we suffer. Generally speaking, studies show that the quantity and
quality of our social relationships have an enormous impact on
our well being, both mental health and physical health. People
who maintain more and high quality social relationships tend to
live longer and healthier than those who do not. So,

(11:29):
you know, for being someone who has very few friends
at this point, like I don't hang out with very
many people at all, I look at this and I
think I need to get out there more and actually
for meaningful friendships, not just be like, hey, how's it going,
what's your sign? Nice to see you come here. Often
like to actually get meaningful relationships because they are very
important to our health. So there is strong evidence supporting

(11:51):
a link between socialization in general and mental health. There's
lots of research that says that it's an important factor
for our mental health. Is this aspect of socialization not
that people who are kind of loaners or whatever are
mentally unwell, that's not necessarily the case. But generally speaking,
we tend, we humans tend to do better when we

(12:14):
have good socialization. Now let's move on to social networks. Now.
I'm sure some of y'all out there are old enough
like me to remember a time before there were really
online social networks, or at least a time before we
had sites that served purely as a social network. I
think back to the bulletin Board System or BBS days

(12:35):
and I can remember logging into a service and skimming
the message boards, and these BBSs often existed on a
single person's computer somewhere. So this wasn't the Internet. You
weren't logging into a network of networks. You were literally
dialing into a computer that hosted this bulletin board. Now
that computer might link to other computers and share a

(12:56):
message board between them, which increased the reach of the
bulletin board system, but it still wasn't the Internet yet,
not for the average person, but for a lot of folks,
it was a preview of what the Internet would be.
It was just on a much smaller scale, kind of
think of like a community bulletin board version of the Internet.
And back in those days, a lot of folks, myself included, thought, Wow,

(13:19):
this technology is going to transform the world. We're going
to be able to communicate with each other instantly, no
matter where in the world we happen to be. We'll
be able to find people who share our interests and
make friends in brand new ways. It is going to
be amazing. In fact, I'm going to tell you another
story to sort of illustrate this Before I get to that. However,

(13:40):
let's take a quick break to thank our sponsors. Okay,
so before the ad break, I promised y'all a story.
So when I was a kid, I loved fantasy novel
I mean I still do, but I don't read them

(14:02):
as much as I used to because I read a
lot of other stuff now. But when I was a kid,
I wasn't really into science fiction very much. I mean
I liked some science fiction movies and television shows, but
I didn't read science fiction books. I loved fantasy novels.
I knew precisely three other kids in my personal life

(14:22):
who also liked fantasy novels to various degrees. So our
tiny little social group of four people kind of helped
us get through the experiences of like middle and high
school because none of us fit in particularly well with
the rest of the student body. I wouldn't say we
were like ostracized or ridiculed or anything. I mean, maybe

(14:43):
we were, but I wasn't aware of it, which is
probably for the best. But like, I just didn't integrate
well with the main student body, not being so savvy
with things like mainstream entertainment or sports or any of that. However,
you know, there was something special about my childhood that
my friends lacked, and that was that my parents write

(15:06):
science fiction and fantasy and horror and mysteries and other
types of fiction. They are published authors. My father has
written more than a hundred published works at this point
in that field in fiction. And one way that my
parents would promote their work it was really my dad.
At this point. Mom would also write, but that was
later on. Dad would go to different regional science fiction

(15:31):
and fantasy conventions where fans would come together and they
would hang out and party and have a great time
for a weekend. These conventions had names like Dixie Trek,
Dixie Dixie Trek, or Phoenix Con. Atlanta is known as
the City of the Phoenix, or the Atlanta Fantasy Fair.
That was a really big one. So these days, the

(15:54):
really big one in the Southeast is Dragon Con. And
in fact, my dad was the first toastmaster Dragging when
it first got started. And it was at these science
fiction and fantasy conventions that I saw the power of community.
So in the quote unquote real world, a fantasy novel
geek could end up feeling pretty darn isolated in those days,
but at these conventions I would become part of an

(16:16):
enormous community of fans, so you could go to panel
discussions about your favorite book where people would talk about
fan theories or discuss certain works in depth, or sometimes
you might even get a chance to hear the author
himself or herself speak, And everything was a celebration of
the geeky interests for the most folks attending, I mean,

(16:38):
it was an experience you just couldn't replicate back home,
because there just weren't enough people you knew in your
everyday life where you could have these kinds of interactions.
These conventions were special. They gave fans a place in
time to really engage in their interests and to celebrate them.
So early on the Internet seemed to be shaping up
in a way that it could do this, but through computers. Right,

(17:01):
that could involve creating, you know, communities that celebrate specific
interests online, and you wouldn't be restricted to just attending
a convention one weekend out of the year in order
to get together with friends and talk about, you know,
the latest episode of Quantum Leap or whatever. Now you
could go online and join a forum dedicated to your
favorite show or movie or book series or whatever. And

(17:24):
if there wasn't one, out there, you could make one
and folks would find it. Now way back in the day,
I remember joining a forum called the Bronze, and it
was a community that celebrated the television series Buffy the
Vampire Slayer, and I ended up meeting up a bunch
of other fans that way, including someone who ultimately went
on to write for the series Angel, which spun off

(17:44):
of Buffy. I met some of the musicians who provided
music for the show's soundtrack. I even ultimately ended up
meeting some of the actors, writers, and directors of the series.
So first I met them online and then later I
met them in person. It was great. So for a
while it seemed like the Internet and the Web in particular,
we're going to revolutionize the way we socialize with one another,

(18:05):
and a lot of us who were optimists thought that
we might be able to form really deep, meaningful relationships
online and that would be just as important and relevant
and deep and meaningful as the relationships we had out
in the quote unquote real world. It ended up being
true for me. I mean, I met my partner online
way back in the nineteen nineties and we're still together

(18:27):
thirty years later. But social platforms would end up introducing
a lot more than just a way to connect with
other people. I don't think the optimists out there took
into account the development of recommendation algorithms, for example. So
the algorithm's job, when you really get on to it
is to convince you to stay on the platform for

(18:48):
as long as possible, to hold your attention as long
as it possibly can. So the algorithm is supposed to
serve up material that you're going to find engaging. Now
that doesn't mean good, but engaging, because it doesn't matter
if the stuff you see makes you feel happy or sad,
or angry or scared or any other specific emotion. That

(19:11):
doesn't matter at all to the algorithm. What matters is
that you stay there, You don't leave the page. Preferably,
you engage with whatever the content is, you know, by
clicking that you like it, or leaving a comment, or
perhaps best of all, sharing it with other people. That's
really the algorithm's job, And the recommendation algorithm is necessary

(19:32):
because the social networking site is a business. We're the product,
right The site isn't selling anything to us, apart from
some sites that offer like a premium experience in return
for a subscription. Otherwise, these companies make their money through advertising.
The more valuable the landscape is, the more these sites
can charge to put ads across that landscape. And if

(19:55):
the site can assure advertisers that their ads are going
to match up with appropriate audiences, thus improving the chance
that folks will actually click through the ad to buy something,
then they can charge even more for those ads. So again,
the emotional reaction users have while they're using the service,
that doesn't matter, because sad people they're worth exactly the

(20:17):
same amount of money as happy people as long as
they're staying engaged on the site. If you are happy
or sad, you're worth the same amount to Facebook. And
it's easier to find stuff that makes users sad or
anxious or whatever. Well, naturally, if it's easier to find
that stuff, that material is going to get served up
to users more frequently, and you're going to be encountering

(20:37):
that stuff on a more frequent basis. Now, if you
contrast that with the early days of social networking sites,
before they had found a way to monetize their operations,
then things are drastically different. You often had sites that
used a much more straightforward approach to content organization. I
still miss the old days where I could log into

(20:58):
a site like Facebook and I could just look at
my friends' posts in reverse chronological order, so all I
had to do was keep scrolling, and I would eventually
catch up on what everyone was doing, and I would
know I had a good idea, like I've seen everything.
But today, if I go to Facebook, I get a
hodgepodge of posts from the last several days. They're organized

(21:20):
in no discernible order, and there's tons of ads peppered
into boot. All right, now, let's get back to the paper.
So according to the meta analysis paper that I mentioned
at the top of the episode, the negative impact of
social media, or the correlation between social media and the
mental health problems is apparent. And then that sounds logical.

(21:41):
I mean, there's like a common sense element to that, right,
I mean I just explained that the site is designed
to keep people there as long as possible, and the
way to do that is to catch and hold their attention,
and negative stuff can do that fairly effectively. So it's
no surprise that negative stuff rises to the top and
that this can have an impact on people. But that's
still a long way to go from proving there's a

(22:03):
causal link between social networking use and mental health issues.
So the paper did share some pretty interesting findings. One
of those is that a person's age didn't seem to
affect the impact of social networking use, so whether you
were old or young, there didn't seem to be much
of a change there, although a lot of the studies

(22:25):
would end up focusing on pre adolescent users. Gender, however,
did seem to have a factor when it came to impact.
Those who identified as female were, in the words of
their authors, much more likely to experience a negative impact
to mental health than those who identified as male. Now,
I'm not sure how much I should actually trust this

(22:47):
paper if I'm honest, because as I was reading it
early on, I found an error in the paper. It
includes a bar graph that shows gender distribution among the
various platforms, And so this paper came out in twenty twenty,
so keep that in mind. But even so, the distribution
caught me off guard because it flew in the face

(23:08):
of what I had believed. It doesn't mean that I
was right and the paper was wrong, but it did
surprise me. So the one for Twitter was the one
that really surprised me. Now keep in mind, again, this
paper came out in twenty twenty. Twitter was still Twitter
back in those days. And if you had asked me
in twenty twenty, what do you think the gender distribution
is on Twitter? I would have guessed it skewed male,

(23:29):
that there'd be more men on Twitter than women, But
in fact, it apparently was much more skewed toward females.
So men made up only thirty eight percent of Twitter
users according to this study. However, this is where we
get to the mistake in the bar chart. So the
chart says that eighty two percent of Twitter users were
female in twenty twenty. Eighty two percent. Now clearly that's wrong.

(23:52):
Like if I told you eighty two percent of the
people on Twitter in twenty twenty were women, you would
automatically say no, that cannot be right. But even the
chart itself proves that it's wrong because the two numbers
are supposed to add up to one hundred right, eighty
two percent are women, and yet it also says thirty
eight percent are men. If you add those together you
get one hundred and twenty percent. So my guess is

(24:14):
the bar chart should have said sixty two percent women,
not eighty two. I was surprised to see a mistake
like that make it all the way through edits into publishing, because, again, curious.
The journal that published this paper is a peer reviewed journal,
and typically part of peer review means checking for things

(24:35):
like stupid mistakes, and yet this one made it all
the way through into published format. And maybe it's not
fair to judge a paper purely by a single mistake,
but that is such a simple, careless error, and one
that's actually really easy to catch if you're just I mean,
I was just casually reading this. I wasn't reading this

(24:57):
as an editor, and I just caught it immediately. Well,
that raises concerns about the rest of the findings of
the paper, right, like, if this mistake made it through,
and it made it through not just the writing, but
the peer review and the editing processes, and still made
it through to publishing, how can I count on the
findings of the rest of the paper. But let's carry on,

(25:18):
because I had already chosen this one, so I was like, well,
let's see it through to the grizzly end. So the
paper actually takes its time getting going, which I appreciate
it's kind of like me. The researchers justify their work
by calling out the need for systematic reviews, essentially pointing
out that social networking sites are still relatively young and
that as a result, there's not much research information available

(25:39):
that you can work from, and that their own paper
stands as a resource mainly for future research like this
isn't to draw firm conclusions, but rather to help serve
as a sort of summary for more than a dozen
studies conducted in the area, so that people who are
looking into it further are more readily able to identify.

(26:00):
I don't know how useful that is, honestly, because again
they also pointed out that when they went through Google
scholar to look for scholarly works on the subject of
mental health and social networks, they found like seventeeny eighteen
thousand hits and if there's that many hits, and then
they selected fifty, I don't know what criteria they used

(26:21):
just to select the initial fifty, apart from they wanted
to avoid duplicates, they selected fifty and narrowed it down
to sixteen. I'm not sure that that's going to be
a huge help to future researchers, so I question that
particular part of the justification. But the research site in
the paper is interesting and it really runs the spectrum,

(26:41):
like they summarize what each of the papers are. They
don't go into a lot of detail about the findings,
which is interesting to me. There are studies that concluded
that there's no real link between social media use and
mental health, which seems to be counterproductive to the point
the paper was making. Others that were cited found that
social media could exacerbate mental health problems, so the suggestion

(27:03):
there was that the issues were already present and the
use of social media made them worse. Some discovered that
reading posts correlated more with depression than creating posts, So
it's not just using social network, but how are you
using it, Like if you're just doom scrolling, that would
be associated more with stuff like anxiety and depression, but

(27:25):
if you are creating that isn't a Few of the
studies focused on gender and found that people identifying as
women were more prone to social media addiction than those
who identified as men. One study titled the Use of
Social Media by Australian pre Adolescents and its Links with
Mental Health found that young users of sites like Instagram

(27:45):
and YouTube reported more body image issues and more eating
disorders than those who did not use those sites. That
was something that was really brought to light when the
Facebook whistleblower came forward a couple of years ago. And
the paper goes on to explain that many, but not all,
of the various studies included in their meta analysis indicated
a correlation between mental health and social media use. I'll

(28:09):
expand on that further, and then I'll talk more about Curious,
the journal that this was published in. But first let's
take another quick break. Okay, we're back. So before that break,
I was talking about how the various studies, most of

(28:32):
them were indicating some form of correlation between mental health
and social media use, which, again, that seems to go
along with common sense. I think most people, if you
ask them if they were familiar with social networks at
any rate, they would probably say, yeah, I think that
if you use social networks a lot, you're probably dealing
with some mental health issues, challenges like anxiety and depression. However,

(28:54):
common sense, it's dangerous to go along with that, right, Like,
everyone could have this kind of common sense still be wrong.
It could be that once you look into something purely
from a scientific approach, the links that were believed to
be there don't actually exist. I'm thinking of stuff like
quantum mechanics, Like the world of quantum mechanics is counterintuitive

(29:16):
because it doesn't behave along the same laws as what
we experience in the classical world. Like classic physics and
quantum physics seem to conflict with one another, and it
can be really hard to grasp certain concepts in quantum
physics because they run counter intuitive to the way we

(29:36):
experience the world. So their common sense would fail you
if you were just to use that to guide your way.
So again, like while common sense might say, yeah, mental
health and excessive social networking use are dangerously linked without
actually studying it, you can't say that definitively. So the
authors say that a causal relationship is unsupported based on

(29:58):
the studies at this time. So again they're just kind
of saying what I said before, which is that, yeah,
there are these two different factors that appear to be correlated,
but we can't definitively say one causes the other. So
more studies are needed, in other words, and these studies
need to be designed in order to determine if there
is an actual causal relationship here, or if both mental

(30:21):
health issues and an increase in social media use are
perhaps symptoms of something else, or maybe just a comorbidity. So,
in other words, the findings say pretty much all of
what I said earlier in this episode, we don't have
enough information to make a determination. Let's talk about some
of the problems I have with this study. For one thing,
I mean, it doesn't say anything ultimately. I mean that's

(30:43):
kind of unfair, like saying, oh, it doesn't really say anything,
or it says exactly what everybody already knows, which is
that we don't know. But what the whole point of
it was, it was to analyze these other studies and
to see like if there were any common points that
supported a more firm stance, And ultimately they found that

(31:04):
it appears that there is a link between mental health
and social networking use, but what that link is precisely
is not possible to be determined at this point. Now,
I also wanted to talk about Curious, the journal that
it was published in. It has I would argue a
bit of a shaky reputation based upon what I have
seen it is a peer reviewed journal. That is a

(31:28):
good thing. In general, it's a good thing. Peer review
is important in that if it's done correctly, then papers
that have issues are less likely to be accepted and published,
which means they're less likely to muddy the scholarly output

(31:48):
of researchers. You want good papers to get published so
that we continue to build knowledge and not make things
more murky by including stuff that is unsupported or poorly
researched or poorly designed, whatever it may be. So you
want a good, robust peer review process. However, peer review

(32:10):
is a tricky thing to do. Even really notable papers
that have really good reputations they have issues with peer review.
It's tough. The peer review process over it Curious is
reportedly a very fast one. There's a quick turnaround. Now.
That can be a good thing for researchers who need
their work to be published. There are students who need

(32:32):
to publish works as part of their graduate work before
they can graduate with an advanced degree. I suspect that
this article or this paper was such a project. It
comes across to me as, oh, these were students who
took a bunch of other studies and then they produce
this paper. It strikes me that way. I don't know

(32:52):
that for sure, by the way, that's just the feeling
I get as I read it. And of course, there
are also positions and titles that require the holder of
that position or title has to publish work at regular
intervals or else risk losing their position. Like professors, there
are a lot of professors at universities who are required
to publish a certain number of papers per year. That's

(33:14):
just the expectation, or else they can lose their position.
And publication takes time, like especially for scientific papers. If
you're talking about scientific or medical papers, that review process
could take as long as a year, and ultimately there's
no guarantee that the paper is going to go through.
So if you're under the gun and you have to publish,

(33:35):
and you really need your work to get out there
in order for that to count toward you know, whether
your graduation or holding your job or whatever, going through
a lengthy peer review and editing process is not high
on your list of priorities. So a resource that takes
work and fast tracks it toward publication can be a
huge help to those who need to have their work published.

(33:55):
But obviously the flip side of this is that if
this process is a fact fasttracked, mistakes can slip through.
Like I mentioned one earlier in this episode, it was
clearly a mistake, and it made it all the way
through the process. I actually found a few things in
this paper that struck me as odd or poorly worded,

(34:16):
Like there were bits where I thought that sentence is
missing something, the syntax doesn't quite work. I'm not entirely
certain what they were trying to say, so several passages
in the paper struck me as in need of editing,
just for the purposes of clarity, if nothing else. And
the thought occurred to me that if I had written
this for HowStuffWorks dot Com and had submitted it, my

(34:39):
editor would have returned it to me with a note
that said I needed to rewrite that passage. Then again,
maybe it's because I'm not a scientist. Because I'm reading
this the way an English major reads a paper. I'm
not reading it the way a scientific researcher does. And
that's a fair statement, right. I am not a scientific researcher,
so maybe I am being unfair with this. I did

(35:03):
some digging and found there's actually a quite a bit
of disagreement about Curious in the research space as to
whether it's a good resource or like you know, a
junk journal or something along those lines. So some people
have pointed to it as being really helpful if you
need to get your work published and seen, and that

(35:23):
when it comes to that, it ends up being an
incredible resource. Others have argued that the journal has a
low rejection rate, meaning it doesn't reject a lot of
articles right off the bat, and that the fast turnaround
time means that as a result, they publish a lot
of low quality studies, or at least lower quality studies,
And I fell down a rabbit hole. That is the

(35:46):
mire of scientific publishing and how it puts researchers in
a really tough position, and that a lot of journals
end up being predatory right, like they end up looking
to get researchers to spend thousands of dollars in things
like the editing and peer review services, which makes me
question the whole system. If I'm being honest with you now,
I will say that even the critics of Curious said, no,

(36:07):
it's not predatory. It's not like it's one of those
journals set up to builk people out of money so
that they can get their work in print. They're not
like that, which is good, Like I'm glad to hear that,
So I don't want to cast that aspersion on Curious.
It does appear to be very much legitimate in that regard.
It's just that the process being so fast tracked means

(36:29):
that stuff that shouldn't slip through sometimes does. I have
not read other papers in Curious, so I don't know
how prevalent that is, but just reading this one, I
thought there's some issues here. So anyway, that's why I
went through this whole paper was to kind of get
my head wrapped around what does the science say about this,

(36:51):
because we often will hear things, especially in politics, that
end up relating to the use of social media and
social networking sites and how that impacts people's health. And
while again it seems to go along with common sense,
I think it's important for us to really recognize that
we need more research in this area just so that

(37:14):
we address the issue properly. Right, if the underlying problem
is not the use of social networks, then limiting people's
time on social networks or policing social networks so that
they cause less harm or perceived harm. That's not going
to actually solve the problem if it turns out that
there's another issue that's really at play here and it

(37:36):
just manifests both as mental health challenges and a desire
to use social networks more. If you're just elimiting the
social networks, then you're not really solving that common problem.
So that's why more studies are really needed now. It
may very well turn out to be that the over
use of social networks does in fact impact mental health

(37:56):
in a negative way, and thus by limiting your exposure
to social networks you can improve your mental health. That
might be true, but without the actual studies to support that,
we don't know for sure, and we're just kind of
stumbling around in the dark trying to come to a
solution that may or may not address the problems we have.
And there are better ways to go about doing that,

(38:17):
and more scientific research is certainly one of those ways. Hopefully,
the research that's done in the future will be done
in such a way that the methodologies will be clear,
they'll be replicable, so that if someone else wants to
do the same study, they're going to get more or
less the same sort of results. And that we can
then draw firm conclusions and create real solutions from that work.

(38:42):
Science is tricky, I mean, ultimately it's not. Science is
not tricky when you get down if you boil it
down to it to its core principles, which is that
you know, you're asking questions, you're designing tests to test
those questions, and you're coming up with answers. That's pretty simple,
but going about it ends up being a lot more
work and pretty complicated. But I hope you appreciated this

(39:05):
episode and the look into what does it actually mean
to read one of these studies? This one, I think
it was almost like Baby's first study for me because
against it was a meta analysis. It didn't actually dive
into things like statistical analysis or anything like that. Like
there were no complicated formula or anything like that that

(39:26):
I needed to read over. I was just reading conclusions
about other studies, So this was a pretty simplistic one.
But yeah, it gave me a deeper appreciation for the
challenges that people in the field face when they're trying
to design their studies and publish their work, which wasn't
my intent when I started out in this episode, but

(39:49):
that's where I ended up. I hope all of you
out there are doing really well, and I will talk
to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

(40:11):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.