A Stunningly Bad Study Claims Social Media Devastates Teen Girls’ Mental Health

Advocates calling for government intervention to curb teen girls’ access to social media must present much better evidence of harm than they have come up with so far. The advocates’ own research is quite flawed and unpersuasive.

My cup ran over with criticisms of a very important study of the effects of social media on teen girls’ mental health, without my getting beyond the abstract. Readers will have to wait for the next article to see more criticisms, but these flaws revealed in the abstract alone are rich and worth discussing.

This research paper is a very confusing read, even for someone who is quite familiar with this kind of research. Yet what is said in the paper is crucial to the case being made by Jean Twenge (and Jon Haidt) that government intervention is urgently needed to curb the harms of social media to the mental health of teens. I’ll use the abstract of the paper to discuss how to find flaws in a research study that is intended to influence public health policy.

Parents and school teachers and administrators cannot be expected to interpret original research studies independently. But they might…