Psychological distress, social media use, and academic performance of medical students: the mediating role of coping style

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Shiraly, R, Roshanfekr, A, Asadollahi, A and Griffiths, MD ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8880-6524, 2024. Psychological distress, social media use, and academic performance of medical students: the mediating role of coping style. BMC Medical Education, 24: 999. ISSN 1472-6920

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Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-024-05988-w

Abstract

Background: Given that social media use (SMU) is an increasingly widespread activity among university students, more information is needed to evaluate its relationship with students’ mental health, particularly medical students.

Objective: The present study assessed the relationships between SMU and coping style with psychological distress and academic performance of medical students.

Methods: An offline cross-sectional survey conducted with 398 undergraduate medical students. The survey collected data on demographics, psychological distress (DASS-21), coping strategies (Brief COPE Scale), academic performance (grade point average) and estimated average time spent on social media per day. Structural equation modeling was used to clarify relationships between the main study variables. The study also examined the mediating effect of maladaptive coping between SMU and psychological distress.

Results: Students with higher levels of psychological distress were more likely to be engaged in frequent social media use. Spending more than two hours a day on social media use had a positive association with maladaptive coping (p < 0.001), particularly with substance use and behavioral disengagement both of which could negatively affect academic performance. Maladaptive coping mediated the relationship between students’ SMU and psychological distress.

Conclusion: The findings suggest that medical students commonly use social media as a maladaptive coping tool to deal with psychological distress. Empowering students to adopt and foster appropriate coping strategies could help them to enhance resilience against life stresses and ameliorate potential long-term mental health consequences associated with maladaptive behaviors.

Item Type:	Journal article
Publication Title:	BMC Medical Education
Creators:	Shiraly, R., Roshanfekr, A., Asadollahi, A. and Griffiths, M.D.
Publisher:	Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date:	13 September 2024
Volume:	24
ISSN:	1472-6920
Identifiers:	Number Type 10.1186/s12909-024-05988-w DOI 2216925 Other
Rights:	© The Author(s) 2024. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
Divisions:	Schools > School of Social Sciences
Record created by:	Laura Ward
Date Added:	17 Sep 2024 09:59
Last Modified:	17 Sep 2024 09:59
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/52236