The Impacts of Excessive Use of Social Media on Iranian Adolescents’ Health: A Qualitative Study

Background: The widespread use of social media (SM) is an emerging phenomenon in today’s world, especially among adolescents. Objectives: The present study was designed to examine the impacts of excessive use of SM on adolescents’ health. Methods: This was a qualitative study conducted in 2018 on 27 high school students (14 boys and 13 girls) in Tehran, Iran. To explain the experience of using SM, six open-ended questions along with some follow-up questions were asked through in-depth interviews by two interviewers. The content analysis with an inductive approach was used to analyze the data. Results: The mean age of the students was 16.5 ± 1.34 years. The mean duration of having a smartphone was 3.11 ± 0.97years. Moreover, the duration of using smartphone in a day was 4 ± 1.5 hours. In this study, the themes emerged from 1,273 phrases, sentences, or semantic units separated from the interviews. After refining the semantic units, 861 refined units were created; these phrases of sentences or paragraphs appeared in the form of 7 themes, 18 main categories, and 38 sub-categories. The themes included the reasons for using SM (educational and non-educational, avoidance of negative emotions), emotional (changes in moods, academic failure), social (problems with family and society, relationships with relatives, cultural changes), physical (sensorineural hearing loss, changes in the sleep cycle, musculoskeletal pain), sexual (sexual fantasies, high-risk sexual behaviors), mental health (changes in mental powers and processing, loss of concentration), and the process of using SM (beliefs in the use and pattern of using SM). Conclusions: Most of the complaints and impacts were related to emotional health, mostly with the experience of mood changes and academic failure and social health, respectively. The results indicated the need for planning educational and social interventions to increase media literacy in adolescents.