Considering Social Media Use and Its Impact on Wellness among Adolescents

ABSTRACT

A growing body of literature reveals that social media use could positively or negatively impact adolescent wellness across many dimensions of health. Specifically, the leading wellness model in counseling, the Indivisible Self Model of Wellness (IS-Wel), includes media as an institutional context, but does not explicitly account for social media use. Additionally, while the counseling literature has begun to explore the effects of technology use on individual wellness, social media use in particular has not been examined. Therefore, the authors reviewed the current, empirically-based literature on the effects of social networking site use among adolescents within the framework of the IS-Wel. Implications for adolescents, as well as for counseling practice are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Adolescents
• wellness
• social networking sites
• social media use
• counseling

Acknowledgments

Dr. Thomas J. Sweeney (and on behalf of Jane E. Myers) grants you permission to incorporate the Indivisible Self Wellness Evaluation of Lifestyle (ISWEL) figure including references and description of their component factors as a part of publication in professional journals with appropriate citations.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).