Help please..

[pinkyinptown]

My son wants to do a project about how social media affects your mood, or if it makes you less social. He came up with the project, but doesn't know the best way to execute the procedure. He mentioned having people stop social media for a set number of days and see how they feel, but i think he needs something more concrete, any suggestions?

[chloemk12]

Hi! I think this could be a really cool project!

You can definitely build on your son's idea! You could have people stop using social media for a certain period of time and then journal how they feel. For example, participants could use social media as normal for a week while recording their moods. The same participants would later stop using social media for a week and record their moods. If you follow this format, you may want to have two different groups to ensure that order does not influence results (one group would use social media first and vice versa).

For this format to work best, you may want to try and gather a group of participants with similar social media usage (time, apps, etc). Specific social media apps could also be another variable you explore.

For the journaling, it may be helpful to create a scale for participants to use (ex. 1-5 with 5 representing the happiest mood). With this scale, you can then compare participants' results in the first week to their individual results in the second week.

Let us know if you have any more questions and feel free to play with more variables!