Impact of Social Media on Younger Generation:

Negative Influence of Instagram on Belgrade

University Students

Isidora Đekić 2015/0572

 ABSTRACT

There have been many research conducted in the area of social media and the impact it has
on its users. One research, specifically, conducted by the Royal Society for Public Health and the
Young Health Movement came to the findings that among five most popular social platforms,
Instagram has the worst influence on the young and their health and well-being.

This study tries to determine whether Instagram has a negative influence on the Belgrade
University students’ well-being, and it also gives insight into their general habits when it comes
to using this platform. The empirical data was taken from the online questionnaire filled out by
108 students of two Belgrade University faculties. Results showed that there are respondents who
experience negative feelings when using Instagram, although they are not the majority.

The results implicate that Instagram is extremely distractive, that it may be overwhelming,
and even bad for the respondents’ well-being. Furthermore, the deeper analysis of the
respondents’ answers leads to the conclusion that Instagram may even make its users experience
feelings of frustration and anger.
 Introduction

Social networking sites have become an inevitable part of our lives. You can reach anybody
whenever you want and find out where they are at any time. You can find out how other people
spend their days with just one simple click. This is the possibility social networks have provided
us and we do not seem to have anything against it. We let ourselves enjoy this all-time
reachability. You will often hear people, after taking a photo say: “If you did not share it, it did
not happen”, with a smile of acceptance on their faces, like uttering some undisputable fact. It
sounds somewhat scary, doesn’t it? This sentence serves as an example of how and to what
extent social network lives can become important to some people – to an extent that they may
endanger people’s reality and knowledge of what really happened or not.

Today almost everybody uses at least one of the social networking sites, which is why the
negative impact social networks have on their users has become a common topic of research.
According to Dr. Kimberly Young, although Social Media Addiction is not a formal clinical
diagnosis, it is fair to say that many people spend far too much time on social media and may at
the very least describe themselves as being “obsessed”, if not addicted (Young, 2016). Apart
from that they may become obsessed, when social network users are already feeling depressed,
social media can cause them to feel even more depressed, for it encourages social comparison
and may overwhelm people with negative world events (Sedas, 2018).

Royal Society for Public Health and the Young Health Movement have published a report in
the early 2017, examining the positive and negative effects of social media on young people’s
health. It was a UK-wide survey asking 14 - 24 year olds about five of the most popular social
media platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter and YouTube. The aim of the survey
was to find out how they feel each of these platforms impacts their health and wellbeing (both
positively and negatively) and makes comparisons between these platforms. They were asked
about the impact these social platforms have on the factors including anxiety, depression,
loneliness, sleep, self-expression, body image etc. The social platform which was ranked the
worst was Instagram.
 The focus of this study is to try to determine whether Instagram has a negative influence on
the Belgrade University students’ well-being. Based on the question types used in the above-
mentioned research conducted in the UK, the research will include a questionnaire designed to
test students’ general habits when it comes to using Instagram, as well as to test if there are any
negative consequences after visiting the social platform in question. According to the many
previous research conducted in this area that prove social media generally have negative
consequences on their users, the assumptions are that the research would prove that Instagram
makes Belgrade University students experience negative feelings when using this social
platform.

Methods

The research was conducted in a form of an anonymous questionnaire. It was created in

GoogleDocs and distributed electronically via Facebook. The questionnaire (see Appendix) was
posted in two Facebook groups of two Belgrade faculties, one of which was the group of the
students of the Faculty of Philology and other was the group of the students of the Faculty of
Civil Engineering. These two faculties were chosen in order to try to receive gender-balanced
responses. For the questions were made only for Instagram users, only ones who do use
Instagram were asked to fill in the questionnaire. The questions were written in Serbian, the
respondents’ mother tongue. The sample included 108 people, mainly aged between 19 and 24.
The questionnaire was posted Friday, April 30, 2018 and was open for 2 hours. The questionnaire
included 13 questions in total. There were 4 multiple choice types of questions, 3 simple yes/no
questions, 5 ranking scale types of questions and one open-ended question.

All questions were required, except an open-ended one, so the respondents would not feel
frustrated about having to write their answers and quit in the middle of the questionnaire. As for
the ranking questions, the respondents were given a choice on the scale from 1 to 5, 1 meaning “I
completely disagree” and 5 meaning “I completely agree”. Afterwards, the responses were
grouped into three broader groups: “disagree”, “neutral” and “agree”, for the sake of easier
analysis. The question about gender was the last one, so to prevent respondents from giving
gender-biased answers, as well as the question about the respondents’ age.
 This method of research proved to be fast, but its scope could have been higher. To put it
another way, there is a possibility that if students from more Belgrade University faculties did the
questionnaire, the results would have come out differently.

Findings

The number of respondents was 108 in total, 19 of them were male and 89 female and made
up 82% of the respondents. The majority of the respondents were aged between 19 and 24, i.e.
83%. The respondents were asked to determine how much time they spend using Instagram per
day. 40% of the respondents use Instagram several hours per day, 36% use it approximately one
hour per day and 28% use it for no more than half an hour a day.

The following questions focus on the level of negative feelings respondents experience after
the use of Instagram, if there are any. 20% of the respondents say that they agree with the claim
“I feel exhausted after using Instagram”, 20% of the respondents feel neutral and 60% of them
disagree. Similarly, 20% of the respondents agree with the statement: “I feel jealous when I see
others’ travelling photos”, 17% are neutral, while 64% disagree with the statement. The statement
“When I see others’ photos on Instagram, I often think they lead a better life than I do” has 30%
of the respondents agree with it, 15% are neutral and the remaining 55% disagree. 35% of the
respondents agree that other people’s photos lead them to believe that others have a better social
life than their own, 18% feel neutral and 47% disagree. 64% does not agree with the statement “I
often feel less self-confident after visiting Instagram”, 16% are neutral and the remaining 20%
agree with it.

58% of the respondents say that Instagram does not make it harder for them to fall asleep at
night, 17% says sometimes it did, 12% says that it does, 10% does not use Instagram before
going to sleep and 3% added they did not pay attention. More than a half of the respondents have
noticed that Instagram distracts them during everyday activities, i.e. 56% of them. 32% of the
respondents say that it makes them nervous when they cannot access Instagram for some reason.
 The surprising 81% of the respondents say that Instagram trends do not have any impact on
them feeling either good or bad. 10% of the respondents say they follow trends and enjoy it, and
only 9% say that it makes them feel bad when they are unable to keep up with the growing trends
on Instagram. 37 out of 108 respondents gave an answer to an open-ended question asking them
to give an example of at least one thing that annoys them to see on Instagram.

Discussion and Analysis

Although the research was conducted in two Facebook groups, one predominant with male
students, and other with female students, the respondents were mainly female. The reason for this
may be explained by the fact that there are in general more female Instagram users than male
users in Serbia, as well in Belgrade (Instagram u Srbiji, 2017).

The findings implicate that Instagram may have somewhat negative influence on its users’
well-being, but the results are more positive than initially expected. If we take into consideration
the average time spent on Instagram, 44 respondents out of 108 spend several hours per day on
Instagram, only 5 of those 44 feel exhausted after using it. One of the respondents who spends
several hours on Instagram added “Instagram even helps me fall asleep”. On the other side, 10
out of 13 respondents who face problems with falling asleep spend several hours per day on
Instagram.

Respondents seem to be most insecure about their social life (35%), which is immediately
followed by the feeling others’ lives are better than their own (30%). As with the more specific
questions concerning jealousy and lower self-confidence, the numbers fall to 20%. If these two
statements in this questionnaire have been less direct, they may have resulted in respondents
giving completely opposite answers. We should also bear in mind that some of the respondents
may not at all be aware of some negative consequences Instagram leaves on them, because
people generally tend to suppress negative feelings.

What is most contradictory about this questionnaire is that 88 out of 108 people say that
trends do not have any impact on them when asked whether it makes them feel bad when they are
unable to keep up with the new trends growing on Instagram. The results are surprising,
considering that Instagram itself has become a huge trend in the past few years. In 2015, the
number of Instagram accounts in Serbia was around 360 000 and by 2017 the number almost
tripled, with 1 200 000 Instagram accounts (Instagram u Srbiji, 2017). Furthermore, trends that
are currently all over Instagram, such as thick eyebrows, “nude” make-up, selfies or taking
photographs of food certainly have some impact on a number of respondents, considering their
answers to the open-ended question.

The study shows numerous insights into what respondents feel about Instagram. The open-
ended question on what annoys the respondents actually proves that contents that can be seen on
Instagram make people experience negative feelings. The respondents’ examples can be grouped
into several broader categories, according to what they find irritating on Instagram:

 explicit photographs (of women mostly),

 photographs of food
 photographs of girls with too much make up,
 too many selfies,
 too many Instagram stories (temporary videos or photos)

All of the above-mentioned categories can be put under an umbrella term - creating false
sense of reality. The answers were loaded with negative feelings, annoyance, bitterness,
frustration and anger: “everybody is a conceited supermodel / battered artist with active social
life and a full closet. Nobody tries to be different, but they all try to become the best version of an
existing trend”, “girls who do not take off their make-up, with their “perfect” eyebrows and duck
faces”, “extremely thick eyebrows” etc. One male respondent just wrote “nails”. Based on the
answers of the open-ended question, girls seem to be extremely annoyed by the appearance of
other girls. Only 3 out of 37 responses to the open-ended question come from male respondents.
The overall impression is that content which can be found on Instagram makes its users far more
frustrated than the percentage shows.
 Conclusion

In conclusion, the study has confirmed that numerous studies in the field of negative impact
of social media apply to the Belgrade University students as well. The study focuses on the
negative impact the social platform Instagram has on its users, in this case students from two
faculties of the Belgrade University. Although the results of the research do not indicate that the
situation is alarming, we should keep in mind that some problems do exist, and could get worse
in the future. Namely, at least 20% of the respondents confirmed that Instagram can make them
experience negative feelings and around 50% of them say it distracts them from doing everyday
activities. Moreover, the deeper analysis of the respondents’ answers gives an insight into the
consequences of overwhelming trends that roam over Instagram, which make many of its users
feel frustrated.

We should keep in mind that the number of the respondents may not be a representative
number for the entire University of Belgrade, so we can leave space for a wider research to be
conducted in this area. It could give us a clearer picture about the whole issue of negative
influence of Instagram and even give us an idea of how to solve the problem in its entirety. For
now, the first step towards solving a problem is acknowledging that the problem exists.
 References

 Young, S. K. (n.d.). Social Media Addiction, Retrieved from

http://netaddiction.com/ebay-addiction/
 Sedas, M. (2018). Why Does Social Media Make You Depressed? Retrieved from
https://www.healthyplace.com/blogs/copingwithdepression/2018/01/why-social-media-
causes-us-to-feel-depressed/
 Instagram u Srbiji – Svi smo tu! (2017). Retrieved from https://ellectadigital.rs/instagram-
u-srbiji-svi-smo-tu/
 The Royal Society for Public Health and the Young Health Movement, (2017). Status of
Mind: Social media and young people’s mental health, Retrieved from
https://www.rsph.org.uk/uploads/assets/uploaded/62be270a-a55f-4719-
ad668c2ec7a74c2a.pdf
 Appendix

Questionnaire

1. How much time do you spend on Instagram per day?

 No longer than half an hour
 Approximately one hour
 Several hours
 Other …
2. For each of the statements, choose the response that best characterizes how you feel about
them:
Strongly Strongly
Disagree Neutral Agree
Disagree Agree
I feel exhausted after using
1 2 3 4 5
Instagram
I feel jealous when I see
1 2 3 4 5
others’ travelling photos
I often feel less self-
confident after visiting 1 2 3 4 5
Instagram
Other people’s photos lead
me to believe they have 1 2 3 4 5
better social lives then me
When I see others’ photos
on Instagram, I often think
1 2 3 4 5
they lead a better life than I
do
3. Is it harder for you to fall asleep, after using Instagram?
 Yes, I agree
 Sometimes
 I do not agree
 I do not use Instagram before going to sleep
 Other…
4. Have you noticed that Instagram distracts you from doing everyday activities?
 Yes
 No
5. Do you get nervous when you cannot access Instagram for some reason?
 Yes
 No
6. Do you feel bad when you cannot keep up with the trends emerging on Instagram?
(e.g. fashion trends, technology…)
 Yes
 No
7. How old are you?
 19 – 24
 Older than 24
8. Gender
 Male
 Female