Effect of Media Use on Anxiety and Well Being During First Lockdown: A Comparison Between Habitats in India

The present study investigated the effects of social media usage and media consumption on anxiety and subjective well-being of people from three different geographical areas: Rural, Urban Municipal and Metropolitan Cities, during the first lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic in India. Our sample of 190 females (45 %) and 236 males (55 %) aged between 33.65 ± 11.46 from which Rural = 90, Urban Municipal = 190, Metropolitan City = 146. The administered tests were Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Well-Being Scale for measuring well-being and Beck’s Anxiety Inventory for measuring anxiety. It shows significant positive correlation between daily media usage for Urban municipal area (r = .25; p = 0.00039), significant negative correlation between media consumption and well-being for metropolitan city (r = -0.21; p = 0.0095) and urban municipal area (r = -0.15; p = 0.041). To check the group differences in media consumption we ran one way – ANOVA which showed no significant differences between habituation in daily media usage (F (2,423) = 2.35, p = .097). Our results show significant systematic differences between the habitats of the three areas, suggesting that further research is needed for other psychological constructs and their differences across habitats, as they might show as well some variance at inter-groups level. We have used Pearson correlation for checking the relationship between daily media usage, well-being scores and anxiety scores.