Daily use of social media increases body dissatisfaction of adolescent girls in a large cross-cultural survey
Daily use of social media increases body dissatisfaction of adolescent girls in a large cross-cultural survey
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CRIS Scientific Seminar 2023-2024
Friday, January 19th 2024, 11:30 am
Sciences Po, Room K008 (1, St-Thomas-d'Aquin)
Daily use of social media increases body dissatisfaction of adolescent girls
in a large cross-cultural survey
Thomas Breda
CNRS - Paris School of Economics
We provide a large-scale investigation of the relationship between social media consumption and body dissatisfaction among a sample of more than 50,000 teenagers between 15 and 16 y.o.
This relation is positive and large for girls—higher use of social networks is associated with higher dissatisfaction about their body—and negative for boys.
The positive relation for girls is observed in all eight countries included in the study, covering very different cultural contexts (e.g., Georgia, Ireland, Spain, Mexico, Panama or Hong Kong).
It is observed for all girls, no matter their body mass index (BMI), their academic performance, and their socioeconomic background. Instrumenting social networks consumption by students’ or students’ peers’ internet access at home while controlling finely for other students’ or students’ peers’ household characteristics finally suggests that the relationship between social media consumption and girls' body dissatisfaction could be causal.
