Impact of Use of Social Networking Sites on Mental Health among Adolescents

Present investigation attempts to focus on mental health problems of adolescents as they represent the largest and fastest growing generation using technology specifically social networking sites for various purposes such as schoolwork, information gathering and communication purposes. This inclination of adolescents seems to harm their mental health of them as many mental health problems might arise at the stage of adolescence as many changes take place in this phase of life. Sample consists of 80 adolescents chosen from senior secondary schools through purposive random sampling. The Mental Health Inventory-38 (Rand Group, 1993) and Social Media Addiction Scale (Arslan and Kirik, 2013) were administered for data collection. Data was analyzed by applying t-test and the difference was found to be significant. The trend of results also showed that adolescents who use social networking sites for less time have better mental health as compared to the adolescents who use social networking sites for more than one and two hours.