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Person-Specific Analyses of Smartphone Use and Mental Health: Intensive Longitudinal Study
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- Person-Specific Analyses of Smartphone Use and Mental Health: Intensive Longitudinal...
Merve Cerit, Angela Lee, Jeffrey Hancock, Adam Miner,
Mu-Jung Cho, Daniel Muise, Anna-Angelina Garron Torres,
Nick Haber, Nilam Ram, Thomas Robinson & Byron Reeves
Contrary to popular concerns about the harmful effects of media use on mental health, research on this relationship is ambiguous, stalling advances in theory, interventions, and policy. Scientific explorations of the relationship between media and mental health have mostly been found null or have small associations, with the results often blamed on the use of cross-sectional study designs or imprecise measures of media use and mental health.
This exploratory empirical demonstration aims to answer whether mental health effects are associated with media use experiences by (1) redirecting research investments to granular and intensive longitudinal recordings of digital experiences to build models of media use and mental health for single individuals over the course of 1 year, (2) using new metrics of fragmented media use to propose explanations of mental health effects that will advance person-specific theorizing in media psychology, and (3) identifying combinations of media behaviors and mental health symptoms that may be more useful for studying media effects than single measures of dosage and affect or assessments of clinical symptoms related to specific disorders.
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Cerit, M., Lee, A. Y., Hancock, J., Miner, A., Cho, M.-J., Muise, D., Garròn Torres, A.-A., Haber, N., Ram, N., Robinson, T. N., & Reeves, B. (2025). Person-Specific Analyses of Smartphone Use and Mental Health: Intensive Longitudinal Study. JMIR Formative Research, 9(1), e59875. https://doi.org/10.2196/59875
