Imagine that you are studying eating disorders and want to test the

hypothesis that exposure to social media causes people to be less

satisfied with their own appearance.
Explain what type of study should be used (case study, correlational,
experimental), who you would recruit for your study, how you would
define the variables in your study, and what the participants would
do.
Be as detailed and specific as possible. If applicable to this study,
identify the independent and dependent variables.
I think that an experiment might seem like the best study type to use, but it's not actually the most
feasible for this hypothesis. The hypothesis is trying to determine whether there's a causal link between
social media exposure and low appearance satisfaction, so at first it may make sense to try an
experiment. However, attempting to manipulate the independent variable—which would be exposure
to social media—would be extremely difficult, if not completely impossible. The relationship could be
causal, but it's for the reason of impracticability (impossibility or issues with ethics) that I believe a
correlational study is better suited than an experimental study. Even so, with this type of study I would
only be able to determine whether there's a relationship; I wouldn't be able to indicate a causal link. I
think that the best correlational method to use would be to issue surveys to people to determine
variables such as: how often they're exposed to social media, how long they're exposed to it on a daily
basis, how satisfied they are with their appearance, etc on scales. I would prefer to assign an online-
based survey rather than a paper-based one or even a telephone interview. It seems that children,
young adults, middle aged adults are the ones that use social media the most, but I would try to recruit
only young adults (ages 18-35 years) for my study because, compared to older adults, this group seems
to use social media more often and consistently. I wouldn't try to get child participants to answer a
survey.
Like previously mentioned, I would use a survey method and try to best structure my
questions/statements in order to collect ordinal/ratio data (e.g. How often do you check social media
per day? Using the scale below, indicate how strongly you agree with this statement: I am often satisfied
with how I look). I wouldn't try to define variables such as levels of happiness or appearance satisfaction
anymore than by just providing a ranking scale, but I might try to determine which social media
platforms participants use the most (e.g. Twitter versus Facebook versus Instagram, etc) and how much
time they may spend on each. Because this isn't an experiment or case study, participants don't need to
visit a different location or anything like that. They can simply continue their usual social media usage
and all I would require them to do is to complete a questionnaire.