Abstract
Due to the widespread use of social media whereby millions of Americans spend an ever-increasing amount of time on different platforms to the extent that surfing through platforms has become a daily task for many of us, social scientists have taken an interest in studying the potential risks and benefits of our use of this technology for individuals and our society. This thesis investigates social media usage and health outcomes for American adults using the 2016 General Social Survey. The use of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat was tested for association with variables designed to measure health outcomes such as happiness, depression loneliness, sadness, and restless sleep with age, gender, race, and years of education as control variables. While there was very little support for the ten hypotheses tested in this paper, a few statistically significant associations were found such as Facebook use and the number of poor mental health days and Instagram with how much time sleep was restless. An important limitation with using secondary data such as the GSS is that it was not possible to examine (or control for) the amount of time people use social media platforms as this information was not assessed in the survey. Although there were only a few statistically significant associations between social media use and health outcomes in 2016, measurement of social media use variables in future iterations of the General Social Survey should be seriously considered as usage of these platforms has grown significantly in the years since.