Abstract: Recently, social media has become an essential part of life of people, particularly young population representing the main source of obtaining news and connecting them with others. Conflicting results have been reported on the association between the utilization of social media and depression in previous studies.
Objectives: To investigate the social media use among medical students in Taif University, and exploring the impact of its overuse on depression and academic performance of the students.
Subjects and Methods: This cross-sectional analytic study was conducted in college of medicine, Taif University. All regular Saudi medical male and female students of the fifth and sixth were invited to participate in the study by filling in the study questionnaire during 2018. The questionnaire consists of the following parts;.Socio-demographic characteristics of the students, details regarding utilization of social media use, history of factors that could be associated with the development of depression and assessment of depression using a PHQ-9 instrument.
Results: Three hundred eighty eight students were included in the study. Their age ranged between 22 and 27 years with an arithmetic mean of 23.5 years and standard deviation “SD” of ±0.9 years. The most frequent programs were chatting programs (30.4%), snapshot (25.6%) and Twitter (21.6%). Concerning daily usage, more than one third of them (36.4%) used social media for three to six hours daily while 11.3% used them for more than 9 hours daily. The prevalence of depression was 62.4%; 36.3% was mild whereas 19.6% and 6.4% was moderate or severe, respectively. Multivariate logistic regression analysis revealed that Female, single students, those with study/academic problems, drug and/or alcohol users and students exposed to physical or psychological violence were more likely to develop depression than their counterparts. There was no significant association between social media use and depression. Academic performance of students was significantly affected by the duration of social media use, p<0.001.
Conclusion: Depression is highly prevalent among senior medical students at Taif University with no significant association between it and social media use However, academic performance of students was significantly affected by the duration of social media use.
Keywords: social media, senior medical students, academic performance.
Title: Social Media Overuse and Its Association with Depression and Academic Performance of Senior Medical Students at Taif University
Author: Dr. Mohammed Saleh Alghamdi, Dr. Mohammed Alzaydi
International Journal of Healthcare Sciences
ISSN 2348-5728 (Online)
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