The article I chose is “Negative consequences from heavy social networking in adolescents: The mediating role of fear of missing out.” This article explores the effects of SNS (social networking sites) on Latin American youth. The participants were from 17 different Latin American countries, totalling 5280 social media users in total. The data was collected through an online questionnaire. The ages of the participants were 16-18, and participants were in secondary school.
The questionnaire included questions from the self-report Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale. This has 14 question with 4 alternative answers and is used to assess depression in teens. Fear of Missing Out was assessed using the Spanish translation of the FOMO scale, this included ten questions that could be ranked on a scale of 1 to 5. The questionnaire was hosted online and the participants were guaranteed confidentiality and had given informed consent. The statistical standard procedures were performed by using SPSS 21.0 for Windows. Pearson correlations were calculated to test for zero-order relationships between two variables. The structural equation model analysis was computed with MPLUS 6.12. Because the proportion of female participants was much higher than that of males, and because women scored higher on SNI, the model was tested separately for both genders, using mean structure analysis. The findings illustrate that in the case of males, depression showed no effect on negative consequences, which were also not mediated by FOMO and SNI. In contrast, in the case of females, psychopathological symptoms were still significant predictors of negative consequences.
