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Aim of the project

Aim of the project

The aim of the project is to unravel individual differences in the effects of social media use on various aspects of the well-being of Dutch youth. AWeSome’s person-specific paradigm will help to reveal which positive or negative consequences of social media use hold for which individual adolescents. 

Project AWeSome incorporates theoretical approaches from the fields of communication science and developmental psychology and relies on intensive longitudinal data collection methods, including survey, experience sampling, and physiological measurements. Advanced statistical modelling techniques are used to analyze the short- and long-term effects of social media use on the well-being of each individual adolescent...

The positive connotation of Project AWeSome is meant to emphasize the potential helpful impact that the result of the project may have on parents, teachers, policy makers, and, last but not least, adolescents themselves. To learn more about this project, please email   This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Recent Publications & Project Updates

July 06, 2026

Encouragement of suicide in the feeds of young Dutch people

Fenna van Loenhout from Nu.nl spoke with Project AWeSoMe post-doctoral researcher Rebecca Godrad about harmful content on the TikTok feeds of Dutch adolescents. Preliminary findings suggest that nearly all youth from a community-based sample encounter…
June 15, 2026

Project AWeSoMe wins Open Science Award ⭐

We are very proud that Project AWeSoMe has been awarded an Open Science Community Amsterdam (OSCA) Award in the category “Transparency / Metascience / Preregistration / Reproducibility” 🏆 Since the founding of AWeSoMe in 2018, Open Science principles…
May 19, 2026

Project AWeSoMe article among most-read in Child Development🥇

Project AWeSoMe is proud to share that the article Changing or stable? The effects of adolescents' social media use on psychosocial functioning by Loes Pouwels, Ine Beyens, Loes Keijsers, and Patti Valkenburg has ranked within the top 10% most-viewed…
March 02, 2026

Publication Alert: How Does Social Media Make Adolescents Lonely?

How does using social media relate to feeling lonely, and why do some adolescents seem to be more affected than others? A new study by Rebecca Godard, Amber van der Wal, and Ine Beyens sheds light on these questions using intensive, real‑time data from…

This project is funded
by a NWO Spinoza Prize awarded to Patti Valkenburg

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