Pre-Thesis Week 8: Continue Secondary Research
This week I continued reading articles on my plan list, and started to design the survey questions.
From last week’s feedback for my presentation, one suggestion is to compare social media addiction to other forms of addiction, and Anxiety, loneliness and Fear of Missing Out: The impact of social media on young people’s mental health mentioned this. It said that the addictive nature resulted from the degree of compulsivity with which it is used, and this is linked to both instant gratification and dopamine production. The author defined these instant life sharing social media as ‘Always on’ communication technology, which highlighted others’ activities, compelling users to stay continually engaged.
Two other severe problems exist among Chinese students are involution in the society, and internal friction of oneself. One vivid image of social involution is cinema effect, which means that if people seated in the first row of the theater stood up, people of rows behind would stand up, too. And these social problems are because of single values, formed among young people. Therefore, I’m thinking that whether social media platforms are cuasing single values. Taking FOMO on social media as an example, since the main interactive function of posts on Moments is ‘like’s and comments, these are functions that lead users to focus on counting numbers of likes and comments as target. From another perspective, people’s social beings nature determines that they desire to be accepted and liked by others, so they tend to form similar thoughts affected by other posts on social media platform.
Another suggestion, to look into positive effects of social media or how light users of social platforms behave might bring some inspirations as well, pushed me to read the article, Can social media help young people’s emotional wellbeing? Some methods that could be adopted by social media companies to offer useful information about mental health and to develop tools that promote help-seeking are mentioned. With these in mind, the App Keep might be a great example that social media platform encourages users to live a healthy life.
Furthermore, providing feedbacks for classmates sometimes could surprisingly remind myself some perspectives or methods that could be related to my project. When we discussed about one classmate’s research about psychology trauma , her main concern is that to directly ask about others’ mental trauma might be impolite and difficult, then I remembered that I learned how to organise sandplay therapy, within which process, people would convey their thoughts or feelings through choosing toys and making up stories. I might could combine this element into my primary research. Since it is during the pandemic, and it is difficult to gather a group of people around a sandplay table, I could think of ways to instead this online.
Lastly, followings are survey questions that I prepared.
Survey Questions:
- What is your age?
A. Under 19 B. 19–25 C. 26–48 D. Above 48
2. What is your gender?
3. How much time do you spend on social media platform daily?
A. Less than 2 hours. B. 2–4 hours. C. more than 4 hours. D. Other_
4. Which platform do you use most frequently?
A. Wechat B. QQ C. Weibo D. Other_
5. Have you experienced FOMO? If the answer is yes, on what platform do you experience these negative feelings most frequently?(multiple choices)
A. No, I have never experienced FOMO.
B. I often suffer from FOMO on Wechat.
C. I always feel anxiety and depression on Weibo.
D. Other____
6. What drives you to open Wechat? (multiple choices)
A. Boredom
B. Anxiety.
C. To use other functions, then browse moments meanwhile.
D. Other____
7. Which do you think is the best way to get rid of anxiety and depression caused by Wechat overuse?
A. Install effiency Apps to help you focus on work.
B. close functions like moments in Wechat.
C. Shield certain friends on Wechat.
D. Other____
8. If you are asked to reduce Wechat usage time by 1 hour, what would you do during the time?
A. Excersize.
B. Reading.
C. Sleep earlier.
D. Other____
9. What else would you like to share with me?
____________