Hypothesis: Increased use of social media leads to a negative impact on individuals’ mental health, decline in productivity and a lack in sense of self.

Outline

Introduction

In this section, firstly I will elaborate briefly on how social media usage has evolved throughout the years and expand how it currently affects our society. I will briefly state the importance of my study due to social media usage only increasing as we move forward as a generation, as well as my intentions for my study to bring awareness to the issue. I have several resources chosen to cite that will aid me with relevant statistics for my previous statements.  For my research, I want to examine how our increased use of social media can lead to negative impacts within mental health, declines in productivity, and deficits in our self-concept.  

Literature Review

I plan to start by dividing this section into my three main areas of research, with section titles being: Social Media & Mental Health, Social Media & Productivity, and Social Media & Self- Concept. In the beginning of each section, I’ll give an overview/definition on each area before getting into my main research. The resources chosen will be particular to each area, allowing me to gain pertinent statistics, and be as detailed as possible. Furthermore, I will then explain how I plan to take all the information found, implement it into my methodology and elaborate briefly on what I believe the results may entail based on my previous research. 

Methods/Methodology 

Here I’ll expand on the methodology of choice, which will be a questionnaire. I will use Qualtrics as the software to create it. After creating, I will distribute the link to participants via email. My population is a total of 100 participants, including males , females, or non-binary individuals.  There are four age groups: Ages 13-15, Ages 16-18, Ages 19-22, Ages 23-25. Each age group will have 25 participants each. The same questionnaire will be given to all age groups. I will explain further on the exact questions being used and how those are tailored to gain answers about how participants feel when using social media, for example if they’ve ever felt affected by it, has it ever distracted them from being productive, has it made them question their appearance , etc. 

Discussion 

I plan to start off by stating why I chose my methodology. I will explain its strengths, such as ease of access to participants, ability to have a larger sample group, quick results,  inexpensiveness, etc. In contrast, I’ll then go into the study’s weaknesses such as participants possibly not understanding the questions, dishonest answers, issues with accessibility, etc. I will then go into possibilities of future study options such as questionnaires with more intricate and detailed questions, or separated by gender.