Goal: Better understand how social media affects young peoples’ mental and physical health.
We aim to identify the specific ways youth are negatively affected, individual differences in who is most at risk and when risk is greatest, and modifiable targets for our intervention and prevention efforts. Key questions addressed in this work:
- How do children, adolescents, and families in New Jersey experience social media?
- What are the mental health, physical health, cognitive, and behavioral impacts?
- Who is most at risk? When is risk greatest?
Here’s what we aim to do:
- Build a statewide dataset that tracks youth social media use and impacts over time. This will help us understand how youth are using social media and related, emerging technologies, such as AI chatbots, as well as how youth and parents think about the effects of this use. Through this work, we aim to gain insights into the evolving landscape of social media use and the impacts of technology policies, such as the statewide bell-to-bell school phone ban. This work is already underway and builds on our 2025 Social Media Impact Survey.
- Deepen our understanding of key concerns around social media and youth mental health, including violence, screen time patterns, and suicide risk.
We recognize social media use affects youth differently, and these differences also vary day by day. Our research uses rigorous multi-method approaches to investigate these complex relationships and to identify specific ways that social media use affect youth. We use smartphone sensing to track objective social media use patterns over brief periods of time. We send teens repeated surveys each day (for 1-2 months) to examine how mood and experiences change on an individual level. We have teens wear watches to track sleep patterns to better investigate how social media affects sleep. In all of our work, we aim to understand how teens’ mental health is affected by and affects teens’ social media use and experiences. The goal of this work is to identify specific targets of social media use for intervention, prevention, and policy.