Social media use doesn't reduce time spent with friends and family, study claims

'It's not bad in the way people think it is'

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Social media has often been thought to lead people to spend more time online than with their friends and family, something psychologist’s refer to as “social displacement”.

However, a new study has debunked this myth, finding no correlation between social media usage and a decrease in real-life contact.

Researchers from the University of Kansas conducted two studies which showed that, contrary to popular belief, social media users did not experience social displacement after spending significant periods of time on various platforms.

"That's not to say overuse of social media is good, but it's not bad in the way people think it is," explained co-author Jeffrey Hall, whose findings were published in the journal Information, Communication & Society.

For the first study, Hall and his colleagues compared data from the Longitudinal Study of American Youth between 2009 and 2011, which has information regarding young people’s social media usage and human contact.

They found no link between increased social media use and decreased human interpersonal contact, such as visiting friends or leaving the house to meet someone.

"What was interesting was that, during a time of really rapid adoption of social media, and really powerful changes in use, you didn't see sudden declines in people's direct social contact," Hall explained.

"If the social-displacement theory is correct, people should get out less and make fewer of those phone calls, and that just wasn't the case."

In the second study, which was executed in 2015, Hall tracked the social media use of 116 volunteers, half of whom were university students while the other half were adults.

They found that high usage had no effect on their level of human contact later in the day.

“If they used social media earlier in the day, they were not more likely to be alone later,” Hall concluded.

“It doesn't seem that, either within the same time period or projecting the future, that social media use indicates people not having close relationship partners in face-to-face or telephone conversation."

Now, go forth and indulge in some guilt-free scrolling.