The study concludes that the 14-day social media abstinence intervention led to decreased screentime and body image dissatisfaction, yet it also reports no significant differences between the control and intervention groups across most key mental health outcomes, including depression, anxiety, PSU, FoMO, and loneliness, despite having explicitly hypothesized such group-level effects. Given that these null findings form a substantial portion of the primary outcomes, how do the authors justify the strength of their conclusions about the intervention’s effectiveness? More importantly, in the absence of consistent and statistically significant group differences, can the observed improvements (which appear to occur similarly in the control group) be meaningfully attributed to the abstinence protocol rather than to time effects, measurement reactivity, or regression to the mean?
