The research problem that I am going to explore pertains to the effects that adolescents’ active social media (SM) use has on society. Having reviewed the readings for Unit 6, I engaged in the preliminary analysis of the previously selected general topic to formulate a specific problem to explore. My thought process in choosing the aforementioned problem was focused on identifying some complex areas of interest linked to social networking as a phenomenon that impacts society, which was the general topic. I searched for scholarly sources pertaining to SM’s overall impacts on society and identified certain prominent themes, including social networking’s ambiguous effects and public concern over SM’s implications for mental disease, communication, and well-being. What interested me most and informed the focus on adolescents is that a great body of research problematized the social networking phenomenon’s influences on the adolescent audience rather than the other demographic cohorts.
Therefore, I combined the two components of interest, such as the adolescent population and social networking’s ambiguity in impacting society, into a more specific research problem to investigate. The selected problem deals with a plethora of influences that social networking exerts on adolescents and, therefore, larger society. On the one hand, social networking sites can provide adolescent users with access to health-promoting information, including lifestyle recommendations, mental disease awareness, and beneficial role models, thus promoting a self-care culture and a healthier society. Also, by fostering meaningful connections between peers, social networks enable adolescents, especially those struggling with communication in offline environments, to experience a sense of belonging and find extensive support from like-minded users. On the other hand, SM can hinder the nation’s psychological well-being by exposing adolescents to unrealistic beauty standards, cyberbullying, and the stress of getting fewer “likes” than peers. Notably, the chosen problem could give rise to an actual piece of research. Specifically, it could inspire a survey asking a number of school teachers, parents, and teenage SM users to report social networking’s positive/negative behavioral and psychological impacts on the adolescent population.