The internet could be good for you, says a new report (except, perhaps, if you are a young woman)

This article is brought to you thanks to the collaboration of The European Sting with the World Economic Forum.

Author: David Elliott, Senior Writer, Forum Agenda

• A new report has found internet access to be consistently associated with positive wellbeing.
• But the link between internet access and positive wellbeing was weaker for young women.
• The World Economic Forum’s Healthy Workforces initiative promotes strategies to improve declining youth mental health.

Time spent online is bad for our health, isn’t it? It’s certainly a popular viewpoint.

Because browsing at a desk or scrolling on our phones sometimes takes us away from activities considered more healthy or wholesome, such as exercise outdoors or socializing, there is often a perceived link with reduced wellbeing. But is this accurate?

A new global study has found a surprising answer: the internet might be good for you.

Wellbeing indicators

University of Oxford researchers studied data on the psychological wellbeing of over 2 million people across 168 countries between 2006 and 2021.

They looked at eight indicators of wellbeing among the individuals, who were aged 15 to 99, including life satisfaction, daily negative and positive experiences and physical wellbeing.

Internet access, they found, was consistently associated with positive wellbeing.

Positive correlation

The researchers applied statistical modelling techniques to the data, taken from the Gallup World Poll, using wellbeing indicators to test the association between internet adoption and wellbeing outcomes.

“We were surprised to find a positive correlation between wellbeing and internet use across the majority of the thousands of models we used for our analysis,” one of the report’s authors said.

The authors say because research in this area often focuses on the Global North, they wanted to assess how technology relates to wellbeing in less-studied parts of the world. So they set out to assess how internet access and use might predict psychological wellbeing on a global level across life stages.

Gender variation

Despite the study’s overall positive findings, however, the link between internet access and positive wellbeing was weaker for young women.

While 84.9% of associations between internet connectivity and wellbeing were positive, almost 5% of the associations were negative – with the most observed among women aged 15-to-24 years old.

The researchers acknowledge this is not a causal relation, but they say that the finding is consistent with previous reports of increased cyberbullying and more negative associations between social media use and depressive symptoms among young women.

A complex issue

Many studies have shown social media use to be associated with greater depressive symptoms, particularly among young women.

A systematic review of research into the topic found “higher levels of social media usage were connected with worse mental health outcomes, and higher levels of social media use were associated with an increased risk of internalizing and externalizing difficulties among adolescents, especially females”.

The same report also noted that the effects of social media on mental health are complex, as “different goals are served by different behaviours and different outcomes are produced by distinct patterns of use”.

Ultimately, social media use offers both benefits and risks to the health of young people, it says.

Technology and mental health

Mental health challenges are the leading cause of disability and poor life outcomes in young people, and there have been calls for more research on the relationship between technology and mental health.

Discover

What is the World Economic Forum doing about mental health?

One in four people will experience mental illness in their lives, costing the global economy an estimated $6 trillion by 2030.

Mental ill-health is the leading cause of disability and poor life outcomes in young people aged 10–24 years, contributing up to 45% of the overall burden of disease in this age-group. Yet globally, young people have the worst access to youth mental health care within the lifespan and across all the stages of illness (particularly during the early stages).

In response, the Forum has launched a global dialogue series to discuss the ideas, tools and architecture in which public and private stakeholders can build an ecosystem for health promotion and disease management on mental health.

One of the current key priorities is to support global efforts toward mental health outcomes – promoting key recommendations toward achieving the global targets on mental health, such as the WHO Knowledge-Action-Portal and the Countdown Global Mental Health

Read more about the work of our Platform for Shaping the Future of Health and Healthcare, and contact us to get involved.

The World Economic Forum’s Healthy Workforces initiative is working to identify the implications of declining youth mental health and promote strategies to improve it. With youth happiness reported to be in decline worldwide – due to a combination of social, economic, technological and ecological pressures – this will become ever-more pressing.

As one of the Oxford report’s authors says: “We hope our findings bring some greater context to the screen time debate. However, further work is still needed in this important area.”