Digital media and stress: the cost of caring 2.0

ABSTRACT

This research explores the relationship between the use of digital media and stress. Based on the findings of a national, probability sample of adults in the United States, the use of digital media was not directly associated with higher levels of psychological stress. Some uses of digital media were associated with lower levels of perceived stress for women but not for men. However, the evidence suggests that, for men and women, digital media provides heightened awareness of network life events (AoNLE) in the lives of both close and more distant acquaintances. An awareness of undesirable, major life events in the lives of others can be a source of psychological stress; this is the cost of caring. Thus, the link between digital media and stress is indirect. We argue that the growth of digital media is related to changes in the structure of peoples’ personal communities that contribute to this trend. There has been a shift toward networks that offer persistent contact and pervasive awareness. Findings suggest that different mobile technologies, Internet technologies, and social media afford AoNLE for men and women, but women tend to report greater psychological stress than men, and they experience psychological stress from a wider range of AoNLE. We discuss explanations for the negative relationship between technology use and stress for women, as well as the implications of our findings for research on the use of digital media and psychological well-being, such as the relationship to social support, narcissism and empathy.

KEYWORDS:

• Social stress
• awareness
• social networks
• social media
• cost of caring
• life events
• empathy
• fear of missing out

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Keith N. Hampton is the Endowed Professor in Communication and Public Policy and Co-Chair of the Social Media & Society Cluster in the School of Communication and Information. He is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication, and an affiliate member of the graduate faculty in the Department of Sociology at Rutgers University. [email: [email protected]].

Weixu Lu is a doctoral candidate in Department of Communication at Rutgers University. His research focuses on new ICTs, social networks, as well as mobile locative media and urban space. [email: [email protected]].

Inyoung Shin is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Communication at Rutgers University. Her research explores how awareness through social media is related to psychological outcomes such as stress, empathy and risk perception. [email: [email protected]].

Notes

1. The PSS-10 was modified for consistency with other questions in the survey. The response categories were changed from a 5- to a 4-item Likert scale.

2. Variables were removed if their probability of F (p-value) became larger than 0.10 due to the inclusion of another variable.

3. Using this data, a report on the relationship between perceived stress and AoNLE by Hampton, Rainie, Lu, Shin, and Purcell (2015) did not identify as many events in the lives of close ties as being significantly related to perceived stress as we report here. Hampton et al. (2015) also identified, for women, a relationship between perceived stress and two additional life events related to ‘weak ties’. The analysis by Hampton et al. (2015) was based on an operationalization of weak ties that was closer to a measure of overall network awareness; it included awareness of life events that happened to those whom participants described as ‘close’ or ‘not close’. As described in the Methods section, the analysis in this paper operationalizes awareness of events in the lives of ‘other ties’ as an event that happened to someone ‘not close’ or an event that happened to ‘both someone close and someone not very close’. We believe that the operationalization presented here is a more valid interpretation of the distinction between ‘close’ and a person’s more extensive network of ties.