Tag Archives: Cyberbullying

Calling time on a life of likes could be key to girls’ happiness

There have been increasing calls in recent months for more to be done to prepare children for the emotional demands of social media. Just a few weeks ago, the Government’s Science and Technology Committee announced an inquiry into the impact of social media on the health of young people. But do girls and boys use social media as much as each other and is all this time spent Facebooking, Whatsapping and Snapchatting having a detrimental effect on their happiness and well-being? Cara Booker from the University of Essex, in collaboration with collleagues from UCL, has been looking at trends in social media interaction and well-being in nearly 10,000 10-15 year-olds in the UK over a 5 year period. Their findings indicate that girls may be at greater risk and therefore a focus for those looking to intervene to protect and promote children’s happiness.

The Government’s inquiry into the impact of social media on the health of young people comes hard on the heels of a report from the Children’s Commissioner for England, which says that children between the ages of 8 and 12 find it hard to manage the impact of online life and become anxious about their identity as they crave ‘likes’ and comments for validation. 

An explosion in digital and social media platforms has revolutionised the way we all consume media with a recent report showing that young people aged 12-15 spending more time online than they do watching TV. Indeed, it seems a long time ago that parents’ prime concern around media was how much or what kind of TV their child was watching.

All these major developments have taken place at a time when we also know that young people are becoming less and less happy. In the most recent United Nations Children’s Fund report, UK adolescents are ranked in the bottom third on overall well-being, below Slovenia, the Czech Republic and Portugal.

Of course, it’s important to remember that the internet has done a great deal of good for children: connecting them with friends and family who may be far away, providing great opportunities to widen horizons and learn new things. These things have been shown in other studies to be linked with increased levels of happiness and well-being in children

On the negative side, social media use has been linked with obesity, cyberbullying, low self-esteem and lack of physical activity, all things that can affect the lives of children as they move through school and into adulthood and work.

Social media experiences

Young people who took part in the Understanding Society survey, were asked if they belonged to a social web-site and then how many hours they spent ‘chatting’ or ‘interacting with friends’ on a normal school day. They could select a range of responses from none to more than 7 hours.

At age 10, 50 per cent of girls and 55 per cent of boys said they had no internet access or spent no time on social media. At 15 years, this dropped to 8 and 10 per cent respectively.

Ten per cent of ten year old girls reported spending one to three hours a day (compared with 7 per cent of boys) and this increased to 43 per cent of girls at age 15 (and 31 per cent of boys).

At age 10 only a very small percent of girls/boys were spending 4 hours plus a day on social media. But by the age of 15, that rose to 16 per cent of girls and 10 percent of boys.

Levels of happiness 🙂 🙁

Young people who took part in the survey were asked about satisfaction with schoolwork, friends, family, appearance, school and life as a whole and this was used to create an overall happiness score for them.

They were also asked about any social and emotional difficulties they might be facing using the well-established Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) with a higher score indicating more problems.

For both boys and girls, levels of happiness decreased between the ages of 10 and 15, however the decrease was greater for girls than for boys. Additionally, whilst SDQ scores increased for girls between the ages of 10 and 15, they decreased for boys.

10 year-old girls who spent an hour or more on a school day chatting online had higher SDQ scores (more social and emotional problems) than girls of the same age who spent less or no time on social media. In addition, the score (number of problems) increased as they got older.

Why the gender difference?

So why the gender difference? This is hard to unpick and not something we were able to look at specifically in our research. It may say something about the different ways that girls and boys interact with social media. For example, girls may be more likely than boys to compare their lives with those of friends and peers – whether those are ‘filtered’ selfies or positive posts about friendships, relationships or material possessions – these could lead to feelings of inadequacy, lower levels of satisfaction and poorer wellbeing.

The pressures associated with having peers like or ‘approve’ status updates and a perceived fall in or lack of popularity could add further pressure at, what for many teenagers is a tricky time in their lives.

Boys are more likely to be gaming than interacting online in the way just described and that wasn’t covered in this research, so it’s possible that changes in well-being may be more related to gaming success or skill.

What needs to change?

It’s clear that social media is no short-lived phenomenon and our research indicates that girls, possibly because of the way in which they interact online and the amount of time they spend doing so could be at greater risk.

In her report, A Life of Likes, the Children’s Commissioner Anne Longfield has called for more to be done to check and stop underage use and to prevent children becoming over dependent on likes and comments and “adapting their offline lives to fit an online image”, something she believes can lead to an anxiety about ‘keeping up appearances ‘ as they get older.

Our research really adds weight to recent calls for the technology industry to look at in-built time limits. Young people need access to the internet for homework, for watching TV and to keep in touch with their friends of course, but a body of evidence is emerging to show that substantial amounts of time spent chatting, sharing, liking and comparing on social media on school days is far from beneficial especially for girls.

Gender differences in the association between age trends of social media interaction and wellbeing among 10-15 year olds in the UK, is research by Cara Booker (University of Essex), Yvonne Kelly (University College London) and Amanda Sacker (University College London) and is published in BMC Public Health.

Cyberbullying – the long term effects

For all the wonderful opportunities and connectivity that the internet has brought in recent decades, it seems likely that 2016 will be the year that the internet is mostly remembered for trolling and cyberbullying. It’s a growing phenomenon, not least among school-aged children. In 2015/16 the children’s charity Childline reported a 2 year increase of 88 per cent in calls from children about cyberbullying and the Government recently funded an app aimed at helping pupils report incidents. Meanwhile, a team of researchers at Queen Mary University of London has been looking for the first time at how cyberbullying affects the mental health of young people later on in their lives. Dr Amanda Fahy explains more.

There are three Ps which distinguish cyberbullying from what we might think of as more ‘traditional’ face-to-face forms of bullying: permanence, publicity and permeability.

The thinking behind our study was that all these factors may well mean that the mental wounds and scars inflicted on young people who experience this type of bullying, run even deeper. Certainly it has been identified in numerous quarters as a matter of serious public health concern.

Whilst one or two international studies have demonstrated a link between being a cybervictim and signs of depression, there is little evidence in the UK to show who is affected and how over time. Our research looks at young people who are bullied, those doing the bullying and those who are both bullying and being bullied and goes onto examine their mental health one year down the line.

Regeneration study

The research made use of information collected initially from more than 3,000 Year 7 (aged 11-12) students who participated in the Olympic Regeneration in East London (ORiEL) study which was designed to evaluate the impact of the urban regeneration associated with the London 2012 Olympic Games.

When the students in the study moved into Year 8 (Aged 12-13) they were asked some questions about their experiences of cyberbullying in the preceding 12 months. These included how often they had received rude or nasty comments from someone, become the target of rumours spread online or received threatening or aggressive comments.

The same students were asked if and how often they had been a perpetrator of cyberbullying. Had they sent rude or nasty comments to anyone, spread rumours or sent aggressive or threatening messages online?

A year later when the students had entered Year 9 (aged 13-14) students were asked a range of questions about their experiences and feelings from the previous two weeks and this information was used to create scores for signs of depression, social anxiety and poor mental well-being.

Involvement in cyberbullying

More than 40% of the students reported involvement in cyberbullying in the previous 12 months – 13.6% as cybervictims, 8.2% as cyberbullies and 20.4% as cyberbully-victims. Girls were a lot less likely than boys to fall into the latter category.

Around a quarter of all the young people interviewed showed signs of depression and/or social anxiety and here, with girls more likely than boys to report these symptoms and have lower levels of well-being.

Victims of cyberbullying were almost twice as likely as the completely uninvolved youngsters to show signs of depression even after taking a range of background factors into account. The effect stayed strong even after we accounted for them having poor mental health when they joined the study age 11-12.

Those who reported both being bullied and doing the bullying were more than twice as likely as those who were completely uninvolved to be depressed, whilst those who said they had only been involved in bullying were no more or less depressed than their uninvolved peers.

Damaging effects

The findings for social anxiety and lower levels of well-being were similar to the findings for depression, providing us with a clear picture of the damaging psychological impacts of cyberbullying for victims and for those who were both bullied and perpetrators themselves of cyber bullying.

With 4 out of ten children of this age involved in some way with cyberbullying and given that our results showed that even low level experiences of cyberbullying can have harmful effects over time, it is key that all those involved in the care, education and well-being young adolescents have a grasp of the issues involved and the tools to reduce and prevent its occurrence where possible. Our research indicates that boys and young people who are both victims and bullies are important groups to target.

Longitudinal Associations Between Cyberbullying Involvement and Adolescent Mental Health is research by Amanda Fahy, Stephen Stannsfeld, Melanie Smuk, Neil Smith, Steven Cummins and Charlotte Clark. It is published in the Journal of Adolescent Health.

Photo credit: bad-cyberbully, Winning Information