Digital Well-being and teenage social media engagement
Year Awarded
2020
Amount
€46,812
- Organisation:University of Limerick (UL)
- Audience:Transition Year Students, Post Primary Teachers - Junior Cycle, Post Primary Teachers - Senior Cycle
- Location:Clare, Limerick
- Topic:Science
Project Summary
Building on a request from the Clare Young People’s Service Committee, the Department of Psychology in UL aims to engage with 3 secondary schools for the development of a Digital Detox Intervention (DDI). The intervention will develop modules for Transition Year (TY)students, and aims to promote students’ well-being by increasing their research skills and awareness of the effects of social media on adolescents.
There are 3 steps of the DDI: promoting and designing research projects with the TY-students, running a peer-led intervention for digital awareness, and finally evaluating their intervention.First, 60 TY-students will work with UL researchers in an 8-week research module for exploring the relationships between using social media and adolescent development. Basic research methodology (i.e., literature search, ethics, data-collection) will lead the TY-students to design their own research questions and hypotheses. Secondly, TY students apply their research skills by recruiting 90 non-TY-students to participate in an 8 week “Be Aware Program”. Participant students will systematically monitor and reduce their Social Networking Sites and social media engagement. Weekly reports on participants’ online behaviours will be recorded by the TY-students, who will coordinate small groups of 3 non-TY-students, leading discussions and raising awareness of on-line and off-line activities, digital detox and peer-support. Lastly, TY-students in collaboration with UL researchers analyse the collected data to evaluate the “Be Aware Program”. Basic statistical skills (i.e., means and frequencies, mean comparisons and correlations) will be used to test hypotheses developed in the first phase of this project.