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

Join the Cyber Policy Center tomorrow April 30th from Noon–1PM Pacific for Screen Struggles and Screen Delight: Is Social Media Sabotaging or Saving Adolescent Mental Health? with speaker Patti Valkenburg, Distinguished Professor of Communication at the University of Amsterdam and founder and director of Center for research on Children, Adolescents, and the Media. The seminar will be moderated by Jeff Hancock, co director of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, and is part of the Spring Seminar Series, a series spanning April through June hosted at the Cyber Policy Center.
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.