Screen Struggles and Screen Delight Is Social Media Sabotaging or Saving Adolescent Mental Health? - Livestream

Social media can be a source of joy and happiness for some adolescents but a trigger for sadness and depression in others. Why is that? In 2018, Patti Valkenburg and her team launched Project AWeSome - Adolescents, Well-being & Social Media - to explore the complex relationship between social media use and mental health. Pioneering a person-specific (or N=1) media effects approach, they combined qualitative in-depth interviews with large-scale longitudinal data analysis to understand how social media's impact on well-being differs from adolescent to adolescent. Both their qualitative and quantitative findings challenge common hypotheses about the impact of social media on well-being. In this seminar, Valkenburg will delve into these findings, discussing whose mental health is most likely affected by social media use and why. Her presentation will conclude by outlining future research directions that will further our understanding of social media’s role in adolescent lives.

Speaker: Patti Valkenburg, University of Amsterdam; Jeff Hancock, Stanford University, moderator

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