Research Proposal

I intend on researching the effects social media has on an individual’s level of body satisfaction. I wish to study if the more time one spends on social media, the greater dissatisfaction they will experience. I also want to discover the psychological aspects as to why a person would have a lowered self-esteem and if it could lead into eating disorders, depression, anxiety and so on. I have two interviewees in mind who are both attending universities, they both have been heavily influenced by social media and had deleted their main social networking sites in order to focus on finding happiness within themselves. They both claimed that it was found helpful in alleviating body dissatisfaction, however, did not cure it, entirely.

In my past psychology classes, we lightly touched on cognitive behaviors of humans. Since we are social creatures and there are driving forces that are constantly working in our subconscious in regards of comparing themselves to others. We never went too much into depth about the topic at hand, which is why I wish to continue the research. Since we are living in a generation where we can share personal information, pictures and constantly updating your “followers” on what is going on in our lives, I want to research how common it is for a person to sit behind their screen and feel utter jealousy and inadequacy based from other’s posts.