Chae, J. (2018, April 22). Reexamining the relationship between social media and happiness: The effects of various social media platforms on reconceptualized happiness. Retrieved September 07, 2020, from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0736585318300066 

Introduction:

Social media is something that is particularly popular nowadays. Everyone uses it and because of this some questions arise about what it actually does to our well being. A critical review was conducted by Verduyn et.al 2017  that investigated more into the relationship between the two days. Subjective well being is what was being noted in this research. Subjective well being is equivalent to your happiness and the quality of your life as well. The authors did in fact conclude that social media takes a toll on one’s happiness.It is more likely that one can become less happy the more they are on social media. There was also another study conducted that goes against the first. Veenhoven (1991) believes that there may not be a direct relationship between social media and happiness. It is possible that there may in fact not go hand in hand at all. This study recognizes that the different factors that might contribute to happiness are psychological or biological needs. The overall goal of this experiment is to investigate  how the use of different social media platforms is associated with social comparison and how social comparison relates to happiness.

Method: In this experiment they used Korean Women between the ages of 20-39 women who used smartphones. They did this because Young women that had smartphones went on social media more. The reason why they only use women was because they concluded that men did not use social media platforms as much as women did. Emails were sent to 7,625 women however only 2,335 of those 7,265 women actually opened the email.  There was then a wave 1 survey where 1064 completed it and Wave 2 was sent a month later and 782 completed that one. The rate for completion was 14% and the attrition rate was about 27%.

Results:

There were 2 models included in the results of this investigation. Model 1 had to do with relative happiness and overall happiness. Model 2 was relative happiness and life satisfaction. It came to a conclusion that based on model 1 social comparison behavior negatively predicted relative happiness. In model 2 social comparison was not associated with overall happiness. Also model 2 social comparison was not associated with life satisfaction. Social comparison at model 1 wss negatively associated with relative happiness.

Discussion: Twitter was one of the social media platforms that was negatively associated with social comparison where on the other hand linkedin, instagram, and blogs were positively associated. Based on the findings of this experiment and research they realized that different social media functions work differently. Since they do function differently they are most likely to affect people differently so not everyone would feel the same compared to others. There were also some limitations that affected the study such as single item measures such as the mediator and two of the 3 dependent variables. Another limitation was the fact that there was no differentiation between active/passive or downward or upward use of social media comparison. They believe that future studies should dive more into the relationship between social media and happiness with more theoretical evidence and much more refined measures as well.