Alone Together Online: Digital Social Isolation and Mental Health Disparities Among Urban and Rural Adolescents

Abstract

Adolescent depression has intensified alongside increasing digital engagement, with online platforms sometimes fostering digital social isolation, a subjective sense of emotional disconnection despite frequent online use. This study examined the relationship between digital social isolation and depressive symptoms among 201 adolescents aged 15–18 in West Java, Indonesia (urban = 101, rural = 100). Measures included the Patient Health Questionnaire-9, adapted for Indonesian adolescents, and a newly developed Digital Social Isolation Scale. Due to non-normality and heteroscedasticity, the robust regression method using Iteratively Reweighted Least Squares (Huber’s T norm) was applied. Results indicated that digital social isolation was a significant predictor of depressive symptoms (β = 0.56, p