Adverse childhood experiences and social media use in adulthood. Evidence from a novel EU survey
Matija Kovacic and
Cristina Elisa Orso
No 1531, GLO Discussion Paper Series from Global Labor Organization (GLO)
Abstract:
This paper explores whether individuals that grew up in adverse environments are more likely to engage in excessive use of social media later in life. We rely on a novel EU-wide survey that comprises information on social media usage time, patterns, motivations, and potential overuse, together with a rich set of individual-specific socio-economic conditions and childhood experiences. We find that adverse childhood environments, and especially the presence of close relatives with severe drinking and mental health problems, significantly increase the likelihood of social media overuse in adulthood. Moreover, we document interesting differential patterns between types of social media platforms, as well as between active and passive users. Adverse childhood environments have a disproportionate impact on passive overuse of digital social network platforms, resulting in more frequent neglect of work and family responsibilities. Finally, we show that the effect of childhood conditions on some specific aspects of social media use is mediated by loneliness and social connectedness in adulthood. Our findings have significant policy implications because the interplay between the excessive social media use and adverse childhood experiences may jointly undermine individuals' well-being and cognitive development.
Keywords: Adverse childhood conditions; social media overuse; neglect; loneliness; social connectedness (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D91 I12 I31 J12 L82 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/307106/1/GLO-DP-1531.pdf (application/pdf)
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:glodps:1531
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in GLO Discussion Paper Series from Global Labor Organization (GLO) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (econstor@zbw-workspace.eu).