Medicine and Health Sciences Commons^™

Missing Photos, Suffering Withdrawal, Or Finding Freedom? How Experiences Of Social Media Non-Use Influence The Likelihood Of Reversion, Eric P.S. Baumer, Shion Guha Phd, Emily Quan, David Mimno, Geri K. Gay

Health Services and Informatics Research

This article examines social media reversion, when a user intentionally ceases using a social media site but then later resumes use of the site. We analyze a convenience sample of survey data from people who volunteered to stay off Facebook for 99 days but, in some cases, returned before that time. We conduct three separate analyses to triangulate on the phenomenon of reversion: simple quantitative predictors of reversion, factor analysis of adjectives used by respondents to describe their experiences of not using Facebook, and statistical topic analysis of free-text responses. Significant factors predicting either increased or decreased likelihood of reversion …