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Seen as a real "disease" afflicting humanity, the Internet also has benefits for... health. We don't say it, but serious specialists from Oxford. The data they provide can change the way online social interaction is viewed. The Internet generally has a beneficial effect on well-being, an international study found. The findings suggest that, despite fears to the contrary, Internet use appears to have beneficial effects on well-being. Researchers from the Oxford Internet Institute, within the University of Oxford in Great Britain, analyzed data taken from about two million people between the ages of 15 and 99 from 168 countries, including Latin America, Asia and Africa. The scientists discovered that the level of satisfaction related to their own life, in all countries, was 8.5% higher in the case of people who had access to the Internet, the level of positive experiences in their case being 8.3% higher . In the case of 33,000 different statistical models and subsets, the researchers found that 84.9% of the associations between Internet use and well-being were positive. Andrew Przybylski, professor of behavioral science and technology at the Oxford Internet Institute, said: "It's a bit of a cliche, but extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And if we want to make the online world safer for young people, we can't attack with preconceived notions and universally valid solutions. We need to make sure we're open to changing our views based on the data, and I hope the message gets across and doesn't lead to another silly debate." The professor noted that, in his opinion, there will come a time when people will no longer be concerned about the use of social networks and the effect of internet use on young people because their concerns will be directed towards what is to come. Assistant Professor Matti Vuorre of Tilburg University, the Netherlands, formerly a research associate at the Oxford Internet Institute, said: "We were surprised to identify a positive correlation between well-being and internet use in most of the thousands of models we used in our analysis". In the study, well-being was measured according to eight indicators: satisfaction with one's life, negative and positive daily experiences, two types of assessments of well-being from a social point of view (well-being associated with the area in which subjects lived and their sense of safety in that place), physical well-being, community well-being and experiences related to personal purpose. Factors such as education, income and health were also taken into account, but the study did not analyze data related to the use of social networks. "Overall, we identified consistent medium associations with predictors of Internet use and significantly improved well-being in those who had access to the Internet-or who actively used the Internet-compared to others," who did not they either had access to the Internet or they didn't, Przybylski said.
"We urge platform providers to share detailed user behavior data with social science researchers for transparent and independent scientific analysis to enable a comprehensive understanding of (the impact of) Internet-related technologies in our daily lives," he said. the specialist. For this study, published in the American Psychological Association's scientific journal Technology, Mind and Behaviour, researchers used data from the Gallup World Poll survey of 2,414,294 people from 168 countries, from 2006-2021.
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