14 DAY TRIAL // Abusing texting and social networking might have something to do with poor physical health and mental problems in teenagers, suggested a new study presented at the American Public Health Association's annual meeting.
4,257 students in an urban Midwestern school district were surveyed by a group of researchers from Case Western Reserve University.
The team assessed how often the teens texted, how much time they spent using social networks on school days and the adolescents underwent the Youth Risk Behavior Survey.
The results were a bit concerning: 19.8% of teenagers reported 'hypertexting' – which means that they sent over 120 messages a day, while 11.5% of them were 'hypernetworking' – they spent more than 3 hours a day on their favorite social network sites.
Most of the hyper-texters and hyper-networkers were minority students, girls and coming from a lower socioeconomic status.
The concerning fact about teenagers hypertexting and hypernetworking is that they also engage into more risky behaviors, like smoking, drinking and a higher sexual activity with more sex partners.
They also have more risks of being obese and developing eating disorders, ars technica reports, and even more seriously, they are overstressed and have suicidal thoughts, get less sleep and tend to feel unsafe at school.
On a more positive note, there are however 22.5% of students that do not text at all, and 22.2% of them that are not connected to social networks; they are also in much better health.
Today the world is changing and has very much evolved, technologically, so networking sites like Facebook and Twitter continue to expand and become more popular every day.
This is actually one of the reasons for which the researchers carried out this survey, wondering whether a heavy engagement in these activities could have something to do with health problems or maladjustment.
What they concluded was that heavy texters and networkers were more likely to use drugs, think about suicide, be more stressed and develop obesity more than those who were moderate users or simply abstained.
The problem is that they have not established whether it's watching friends that causes health problems or the other way around if there is any causal relationship whatsoever.