Date of Award

Fall 9-5-2025

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

School Psychology

First Advisor

Ashley Mayworm

Abstract

Social media and technology use have become ubiquitous for today’s adolescents. With the rise in technology use, mental health disorder diagnoses have also increased. Despite the increase in concern for both adolescent social media use and mental health, many schools, parents, and youth service clinicians do not have the knowledge or resources to intervene effectively. The current study explores two research questions. The first is to evaluate the moderating effect of social-emotional skills and social support on the relationship between social media use and mental health through structural equation modeling (SEM). The second research question is to explore whether this relationship differs across intersecting gender and racial identities, using a multiple-group SEM approach. This study is a secondary data analysis of a project completed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Deidentified data were obtained through the Technology and Adolescent Mental Wellness (TAM) data consortium and deemed exempt from Human Subjects Research. Latent variables included social media use, social-emotional skills, social support, and mental health. In total, there were 4,592 participants, with mean age of 14.6 years (SD = 1.7), and 52.1% were male and 66.9% were white. The full sample SEM model included statistically significant main effects (social media β = -.06, social-emotional skills β = .34, and social support β = .69). Further, social-emotional skills moderated the negative impact of social media on mental health (β = -.16), and social support also moderated the relationship between social media and mental health (β = -.08). There was a complimenting interaction where social support moderated the positive impact of social- emotional skills on mental health (β = .07). This model explained 76.6% of the variance, which illustrated a strong model fit. Participants were divided into four groups based on their gender and race for the multiple-group analysis: (1) white male, (2) white female, (3) non-white male, and (4) non-white female. The first step in the multiple-group analysis was to analyze the SEM from the first research question across all four groups. Results indicated that social support was not a significant moderator between social media use and mental health for any of the groups, and therefore, it was removed from the final multi-group comparison. In the final compared model, the main effect of social media use on mental health was not significant for any group, but social-emotional skills and social support demonstrated significant main effects on mental health for all groups. Social-emotional skills moderated the negative impact of social media on mental health for all groups. Social support only moderated the relationship between social-emotional skills and mental health for the white male group. This model explained 86.0% of the variance in the non-white female group, 82.5% in the white female group, 81.7% in the non-white male group, and 81.1% in the white male group, illustrating strong model fit for all groups. Overall, this study found that both social-emotional skills and social support were significant moderators to decrease the negative relationship between social media and mental health. When this relationship was tested across race/ethnicity and gender groups, social-emotional skills were a universal protective factor, but the impact of social support as a moderator between social-emotional skills and mental health was only significant for the white male group. Findings highlight the critical role social-emotional skills and social support can play in decreasing the negative impact of social media use on mental health, which should be taken into consideration when creating school-based interventions.

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