Spending time online may boost your well-being, the results of a large international study revealed.

Researchers at the University of Oxford examined 16 years of data from 2.4 million people, tracking things like life satisfaction and sense of purpose. They found that people with access to the web scored 8 percent higher in measures of well-being compared with those without access.

"We were surprised to find a positive correlation between wellbeing and internet use across the majority of the thousands of models we used for our analysis," said Matti Vuorre, an experimental psychologist and researcher in the study,.

The study mined Gallup World Poll data from 2006 to 2022. Researchers examined answers from 2,414,294 participants aged 15 and up and across 168 countries.

"We set out to address this gap by analyzing how internet access, mobile internet access and active internet use might predict psychological wellbeing on a global level across the life stages. To our knowledge, no other research has directly grappled with these issues and addressed the worldwide scope of the debate," said Andrew Przybylski, a psychologist and another researcher in the study.

Vuorre and Przybylski found that the association between internet access and wellbeing were consistently positive. According to the study, people who had access to the internet reported greater life satisfaction, positive experiences and social life satisfaction.

They also had lower scores in negative experiences than individuals without access.

These results fly in the face of years of concern over the potential harms of internet use.

"We hope our findings bring some greater context to the screentime debate," Przybylski said.

The researchers would like to see this work go further. "We urge platform providers to share their detailed data on user behavior with social scientists working in this field for transparent and independent scientific inquiry, to enable a more comprehensive understanding of internet technologies in our daily lives," Przybylski said.

The Charlotte Observer (TNS)

Being online could actually be good for you, study shows