Sydni Moores

Document Type

Honors Thesis

Major

Biology

Advisor(s)

Lynn A. Atkins

Committee Members

Lennord J. Kass, Shannon McCoy

Graduation Year

May 2024

Publication Date

2025

Abstract

Pre-medical students are a population of high-risk individuals in an undergraduate collegiate setting (66). The term “high-risk” is associated with populations within a specific demographic that have an increased chance of developing an illness due to underlying factors (31). Undergraduate pre-medical students experience chronic stress which contributes to illnesses such as anxiety, depression, substance abuse, and burnout. In the absence of appropriate levels of support, pre-medical students may experience a decrease in their mental and physical health and academic success (62). The impact of burnout on pre-medical students is reflected by the fact that just 23,000 of 140,000 intended pre-medical students graduated their program with the necessary courses and materials to attend a medical college (66). The goal of this thesis is to examine how Generation Z uses their preferred social media site Instagram as a source of social support. Social support has four areas: appraisal, emotional, instrumental, and informational. Two categories of social support are being analyzed in this study: emotional/appraisal (combined) and informational. The 10 most recent posts from fifty-five Instagram accounts were sampled for this research. Each of the 10 posts were categorized using 4 criteria: source, content, language, and resources. From the fifty-five social media accounts sampled, emotional/appraisal support was the most prevalent with 72.3% of posts being classified in this manner while informational support accounted for 27.7% of the total posts. The Instagram posts were observed to be relevant to pre-medical students but were found to have a lack of interaction based on likes per post. Improving social support to Generation Z pre-medical students through commonly used social media platforms is one way to improve students' mental and physical health.

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