How social media impacts the well-being of students, including mental health

Abstract

Human life after social media use has rapidly changed to a certain extent and the usage level is increasing daily. The social media use survey conducted throughout this study focuses on complications where students who are staying in the U.K. on international basis deal with their daily life on social media. The process followed to gain a conclusion was started with collecting data in terms of responses and then pre-processing the information for hypothesis testing and emotional analysis. Machine learning technique was also a part of this research which was used to generate emotional analysis which is performed in the methodology section. Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp were the three majorly used social media platform amongst the participants. Average reported time was around 2 hours daily, whereas more than 2 hours on average were spend on Facebook and Instagram applications. The survey was conducted on students aged 18 years and above and this study has gained qualified ethical approval from the department of Computing and Information Science SREP at Anglia Ruskin University. There was no direct involvement of individuals as the feedback form was created on Google forms and supplied to the participants online. More than 70% reported that they do not face any negative health impacts mentally after using any of their favourite social media platform. Well-being results discovered were able to connect some physical body issues after prolonged use. The Chi-square test was able to draw a graph based on the recorded answers in which the result of mental effects was close to the significance value. Out of the 37 personal feedback received, the emotion detection method was able to divide the emotions in three classifications and found equal results in the state of being happy and sad. The background exploration was able to determine some socially connected concepts of human life along with providing sufficient information on the different processes worked in this theory. It also included longitudinal studies which displayed how and what factors are considered for performing it which can be favourable in future studies. After summarizing all the procedure, the approach was unable to find a direct connectivity in human health and use of social media. Positively, the collected data which was anonymous has the capability of known symptoms of using some of the highly depleted social networking websites.