The darkside of social media in health apps: a focus on wellbeing

Abstract

For many years, social media and social network sites have been part of people’s everyday lives. A lot of concerns were raised about the actual benefits and negative impacts social network sites could have on its users, many studies and research have been made on the subject. For health apps having an SNS, we cannot claim that many research have been done. Indeed, applying the conventional SNS research issues to the health apps industry has been a scarce studied subject.

Therefore, by adopting a quantitative method, this thesis aims to determine whether conventional SNS’s affordances would have a similar effect on users of a fitness app called Strava, which comprises a social network. With the present study, we try to address existing gaps in the literature, and we try to open the door to a more extensive study of affordances in the context of social network sites.

The main research question for this research was: “How can traditional SN features applied to Strava be detrimental to the user’s emotional wellbeing?”. Findings suggested that features of Strava did not diminish the emotional wellbeing level of users in any way. For most of the feature, we can even claim, with confidence, that those features are in fact increasing the level of emotional wellbeing among users.