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This vast study carried out by researchers at the University of Oxford with around two million people will not go unnoticed. And for good reason, at the end of their work, the scientists claim not to have been able to demonstrate any damage to mental health caused by the use of the internet.
“The links between internet adoption and psychological well-being are weak, at best, despite popular belief about the negative psychological effects of internet-related technologies and platforms.“, we can read in a press release made public Tuesday by the University of Oxford. A conclusion presented at the end of work intended to examine the extent to which three indicators of psychological well-being, including life satisfaction, had changed over time in association with the use of the Internet and mobile broadband. To do this, they carried out self-assessment questionnaires and analyzed data from 2,434,203 people aged 15 to 89 in 168 countries between 2005 and 2022.
Among the main lessons of the study, there is the fact that the positive and negative experiences felt by the participants increased during this period, but the researchers did not highlight any significant evidence indicating any questioning of the use of Internet. They go even further by explaining that the few associations observed between internet use and mental health would be weaker and inconsistent than “what would be expected if the internet caused widespread psychological harm“.
“Weak and inconsistent associations”
“We really wanted to find a connection between technology and well-being, but we couldn’t find it“, underlines Professor Andrew Przybylski, affiliated with the Oxford Internet Institute. Dr Matti Vuorre, one of the co-authors of the study, adds: “We studied the most comprehensive data on well-being and internet adoption ever captured, both over time and demographically. Although we were unable to determine the causal effects of Internet use, our descriptive results indicate weak and inconsistent associations.“.
Faced with these unexpected results, the researchers carried out their research to determine if there were any specificities, or different conclusions, depending on the age and sex of the participants… In vain. The authors indicate that there is no “specific demographic trends among internet users, including women and girls“. They even specify that on average life satisfaction increased more among women during the period studied.
“We put our results to a more extreme test to see if we missed anything and found that greater adoption of mobile broadband predicted greater life satisfaction, but this association was too weak to be conclusive. practical significance“, explain the authors of the study.
A lack of data
Please note, however, that this study has certain limitations. The researchers themselves report a lack of data provided by technology companies to “obtain conclusive evidence of the impact of internet use”. And added: “Research into the effects of internet technologies is blocked because the most urgent data is collected and kept behind closed doors by technology companies and online platforms“. The objective now is to be able to exploit this data to study in more detail whether the use of the Internet really has any harmful effects on the mental health of users.