Education Reform Student and Professor Find that Social Media Also Affects Students in Developing Countries

Sometimes the best collaborations start with disagreements in class discussions.

In Robert Maranto's graduate Politics of Education class in fall 2025, during a class discussion on the likely effects of social media accessible through smartphones in eroding student wellbeing, Professor Maranto suggested that the negative impacts were probably confined to affluent countries like the U.S., where students have more time to spend online.

"I hypothesized that in developing countries, young people are too busy working to support their families or starting families of their own, so they don't have the time for social media drama or fear of missing out (FOMO)," Maranto recalls. "People in developing countries also tend to be more religious, so their values might discourage that behavior."

One of Maranto's students, Juwel Sarker, who had taught in his native Bangladesh before becoming a Razorback, pushed back. Maranto's hypothesis didn't sound right because of his experiences teaching in Bangladesh, where Sarker says, "I saw a lot of students spending several hours a day on their phones, with bad effects on their studies, their jobs and their personal relationships — just like here in the United States."

Maranto proposed that for his class research paper, Sarker have friends survey young people at a Bangladeshi university, analyze the data and see who was closer to right, while the professor would help write up and submit the findings. After two rounds of peer review, the resulting paper was recently published in Discovery Psychology as "Social media impacts on Bangladeshi college students," by Juwel Sarker and Robert Maranto at the U of A, and Abdullah Haque and Md Sahab Uddin Sagar at Hajee Mohammad Danesh Science and Technology University in Bangladesh.

The authors found that smartphone usage time affects the mental health of college students in Bangladesh, but this relationship appears to operate differently than it does in the United States. Specifically, high levels of social media use are associated with reduced time spent studying and socializing in person, which in turn is linked to greater academic and social stress.

Sarker stressed that the findings are correlational and tentative. "More researchers should do more studies with different samples before we can be certain our findings are correct," he said. Maranto, who serves on the board of the University's Heterodox Academy Community, said that sometimes, if a professor disagrees with a student or another professor, the best approach is an adversarial collaboration, having people with different viewpoints agree to conduct a study to see who is right.  

Their study, which can be downloaded at Social media impacts on Bangladeshi college students | Discover Psychology | Springer Nature Link, has already been cited and downloaded over 1,800 times.