Children’s Social Connections, Internet Usage and Mental Health during the Covid-19 Pandemic in the Global South: Evidence from Disrupting Harm

Thomas Metherell, UCL Centre for Longitudinal Studies
Sebastian Kurten, MRC Cognition & Brain Sciences Unit
Sakshi Ghai, Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford
Daniel Kardefelt-Winther, UNICEF Office of Research–Innocenti
George Ploubidis, UCL Centre for Longitudinal Studies
Darío Moreno-Agostino, UCL Centre for Longitudinal Studies
Amy Orben, MRC Cognition & Brain Sciences Unit

Technology use, including internet use, has been posed as both a risk and a potential protective factor relevant to mental ill-health in young people, the latter particularly during pandemic-related social isolation. We aimed to investigate the cross-sectional associations of digital technology use with mental health indicators during the COVID-19 pandemic in a number of countries in the Global South, where this relationship is understudied. We used data from the UNICEF Innocenti Disrupting Harm survey of population-representative samples of 11,912 internet-using children aged 12–17 in Cambodia, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Kenya, Malaysia, Mozambique, Namibia, Philippines, Tanzania, Thailand, Uganda and Vietnam. We modelled the associations of social connection and internet use during lockdown with six different indicators of wellbeing in each country and in the overall sample using robust linear and logistic regression. Models were adjusted for a range of putative socioeconomic and demographic confounders. We did not find clear evidence for any general associations of social connection or internet use with mental health indicators during lockdown across countries. Rather, our results are complex and demonstrate that the relationship depends heavily on an individual’s context; not just on the country they are living in but also on urban-rural divides, sex and other factors.

Keywords: Children, Adolescents, and Youth, Health and Morbidity, Inequality, Disadvantage and Discrimination, Population, Shocks and Pandemics

See extended abstract.