Project AWeSome is a multimethod project that started off in 2018 to investigate the psychosocial consequences of adolescents’ social media use. The project consists of several subprojects, including interviews and focus groups among 30 adolescents, a national representative survey among 1,000 adolescents, and a pilot experience sampling method (ESM) study among 63 students.
The flagship subproject of Project AWeSome is a longitudinal cohort study that ran from November 2019 to June 2020. During this period, a cohort of 388 middle adolescents were intensively investigated with different research methods, including online surveys, ESM surveys, digital trace data collection, and Instagram archive downloads.
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
Our commentary, published today in Nature Human Behaviour, addresses a critical challenge for academic research: the lack of reliable access to data from online platforms such as social media, streaming services, and search engines.
Legal frameworks,…
Members of Project AWeSome (Adolescents, Well-being, and Social media) interviewed 480 adolescents aged 14 to 17 about the pros and cons of social media, relying on a survey study and qualitative interviews. For most adolescents, the pros of social media…
Dutch adolescents spend about six hours per day on their mobile phones, of which two and a half hours are spend on social media. What does this their mean for their mental health?
In an essay written for UNICEF Patti Valkenburg, Amber van der…
This project is funded
by a NWO Spinoza Prize awarded to Patti Valkenburg
