Online Social Media Use and Depression in African American College Students
Abstract
Depression has been identified as one of the most serious and common health concerns facing college students today (Eisenberg, Gollust, Golberstein, & Hefner, 2007). Internet and social media use has been shown to impact symptoms of depression (Gonzales & Hancock, 2011; Kim & Lee, 2011; Snyder, Carpenter & Slauson, 2007), yet the relationship between social media use and depression is unclear due to contradictory findings. The focus of the present study is to examine the relationship between social media use and depression among college students, while also emphasizing diverse sampling vie surveying African-American students enrolled in a historically black college (HBCU). In addition to understanding this potential relationship between social media use and depression, strength of participants ethnic identity were also measured, in order to assess if strength of one’s identity mediates the potential relationship between social media use and depression. Findings revealed that social media use had a non-significant impact on participants’ reported levels of depression, and that ethnic identity, nor multiple measures of social media use offered no predictive power toward the outcome variable of depression.
Subject Area
African American Studies|Psychology|Clinical psychology|Mass communications
Recommended Citation
Denver A Hall,
"Online Social Media Use and Depression in African American College Students"
(2018).
ETD Collection for Tennessee State University.
Paper AAI10843322.
https://digitalscholarship.tnstate.edu/dissertations/AAI10843322