Social media use and academic achievement
Gordon and Ohannessian analyzed middle schoolers’ self-reported data on their school grades and social media use from surveys given in the fall of 2016 and the spring of 2017. Even after controlling for age, gender and race and ethnicity, they found that participants’ grades decreased as the frequency of their social media use increased across all four platforms.
“There are many explanations for this finding, which aligns with research on older population groups as well,” Gordon said. “For example, social media likely poses a distraction to early adolescents. Attention that they would typically invest in their schoolwork is diverted to social media use, which ultimately affects their ability to perform well in school. But lower academic achievement may also result from other aspects of development that are affected by social media use. For example, social media use can disrupt healthy family functioning or peer relationships, which can then lower early adolescents’ performance in school.”
The role of parental communication
Gordon and Ohannessian were also interested in how parental communication might impact the relationship between middle schoolers’ academic achievement and social media use. To investigate this question, they asked their study participants to define the quality of their communication with their mothers. For example, participants were asked to agree or disagree with a series of 20 statements, such as “My mother is always a good listener.”
Gordon and Ohannessian found that less frequent use of Facebook and Instagram, coupled with high-quality mother-adolescent communication, was associated with higher academic achievement.
“We think that mothers who were maintaining positive, frequent communication with their children might have also been monitoring their adolescents’ use of Facebook and Instagram, perhaps by setting daily limits,” Gordon said.
In contrast, low-quality mother-adolescent communication and increased use of Facebook and Instagram was associated with lower academic achievement.
Gordon and Ohannessian suggest that frequent social media use may allow an adolescent to establish more autonomy from their parents, which is a developmentally appropriate behavior for this age group. However, in doing so, communication with their mothers and the monitoring of social media may decrease.
