Institute of Art Design + Technology
Dún Laoghaire

Jacob Green 

BSc [Hons] Applied Psychology

I am a recent graduate of the Bsc Applied Psychology course at IADT. Since an early age, I have always had a deep passion for Psychology. I am fascinated by human behaviour and differences in how we each think and act. Over the past four years my knowledge of the subject has expanded and flourished in many directions. I hope to pursue this interest further in the next few years through a masters and various volunteering.

Project Description

Social media abstinence, gender, and their effect on mindfulness is an area of research that is rapidly developing, particularly in the aftermath of the covid-19 pandemic. The pool of research that currently exists in the area has produced a mixed set of results with some studies finding significant differences between social media abstinence and mindfulness and others reporting insignificant results.


Project Objectives

The present study aimed to explore the gap that exists in the current literature surrounding social media abstinence and mindfulness employing gender as an additional variable. A quantitative between groups experiment was employed to test for group differences between those who abstained from social media and those who did not.
Additionally the difference in mindfulness scores between men and women was tested. Mindfulness scores were measured using the mindfulness attention awareness scale (MAAS).


Project Outcomes

The data indicated no significant differences and all three hypotheses were rejected. These results, in comparison to the literature, are expected as there has been a mixed set of results in previous studies and the current study had various limitations such as a small sample size.
This study contributes to the field of social media abstinence, gender, and their effects on mindfulness in psychology and has added research to the gap that currently exists in this area. Literature surrounding this concept is still bare and there is a lot of room for further developments


Thesis Title

The Effect of Social Media Abstinence and Gender on Mindfulness.