Goal: Identify behaviors and strategies for reducing harmful and problematic use, particularly among vulnerable youth.
Key questions addressed in this work will be:
- How can we reduce harmful and problematic social media use among young people and families?
- What are the most effective strategies that individuals, families, and schools can use to reduce problematic social media use?
- How can we change social media platform design (e.g., social media features) to reduce the potential harms of social media use?
We are pursuing three aims:
- Develop an evidence-based understanding of how adolescents develop patterns of problematic and addictive social media use, including the behavioral patterns, social contexts, and platform features associated with high-risk use;
- identify strategies that youth and their families already use to regulate their social media use effectively; and
- develop and rigorously test interventions that can mitigate harmful engagement and promote healthy social media use, including strategies that can be implemented by individuals, families, and social media platforms, and policymakers.
Our first intervention project focuses on warning labels and interruption prompts. Through youth-centered qualitative research, we will examine how adolescents experience problematic social media use, what makes it difficult to disengage, and what types of warnings or prompts they view as noticeable, credible, relevant, and useful. These findings will inform an innovative behavioral experiment testing whether warning labels can interrupt prolonged engagement of social media use and facilitate self-regulation.
Warning labels are only the starting point of the Center’s intervention research. We plan to develop a broader program that will use innovative behavioral, experimental, and intervention methods to generate actionable guidance for harm mitigation intervention approaches. We are creating a dynamic, modifiable experimental platform for the Center to adapt for future studies. It focuses on industry- and policy- relevant changes, such as alternative intervention designs, content exposures, and other harm-reduction strategies to inform future recommendations for social media companies and policy makers.
What’s next? We will build from our first-year activities to inform clinical interventions and targets for industry and policy-level mitigation to reduce social media harms for high-risk youth, including those with problematic use or existing mental health problems. Future work will also target specific areas of need, such as social comparison, bullying, and problematic social media use, and test innovative interventions in school, clinical, community, and online settings.
Our long-term goal is to build a sustained program of intervention research that moves beyond documenting social media harms to identifying, testing, and scaling evidence-based interventions that mitigate harm and promote healthier social media engagement.