SOCIAL Surveys

All individuals in SOCIAL-I were Twitter users. Accordingly, we could not ascertain the role that being a Twitter user itself has on potential differences between individuals in baseline sociodemographics, social media use, and mental health symptoms. To have a sample of individuals who did not use Twitter as well as to have an additional sample in which to assess the transportability of results from SOCIAL-I, we began the SOCIAL-II study. SOCIAL-II recruited college students from a predominantly White and Asian university in the Midwest. Individuals were compensated for credit in an introductory psychology course. Individuals were recruited from September 2020 to the present. We have over 2,015 participants.

This study is scheduled to have an overlapping battery with SOCIALs I and II and will use snowball sampling of Twitter users.

SOCIAL-IV is a bit different in that it is a clinical trial where we also collect social media data! The results of SOCIALs I, II, and III will be used to train classifiers of somatoform, internalizing fear, internalizing distress, and disinhibited externalizing symptoms to track these in SOCIAL-IV participants.