In a message dated 98-08-30 21:39:14 EDT, slippery@pobox.com (Sunah C Cherwin writes:
>>Was there any sort of control, to account for the fact that maybe sad,
>>lonely depressed people are most likely to spend a lot of time on the
>>internet? I don't know if this is true but I'm betting it's at least
>>partly so....
>please read the article I posted. this is a pretty interesting study, and
>runs counter to the expectations of most people I know and to the
>expectations of the sponsors of the study. naturally it calls for some
>followup.
The study showed that an increase in depression was associated with an increase in internet use. However, at least according to the information posted, there is no evidence on the direction of causality. If becoming more depressed made participants use the internet more the results would be exactly as recorded. I'd be mighty surprised if they had evidence on causality - it's very difficult to obtain that from any study without a experimental (as opposed to observational) design.