Why is it that social media use makes some adolescents feel happy while leaving others feeling blue? Project AWeSome stands for Adolescents, Well-being & Social Media. It aims to investigate questions about the relationship between adolescents’ social media use and their well-being.
Project AWeSome is an interdisciplinary collaboration between the Universities of Amsterdam and Erasmus University in Rotterdam that launched in Fall 2018. The project AWeSome team consists of UvA researchers Patti Valkenburg, Ine Beyens, Amber van der Wal, Nadia Bij De Vaate, Loes Janssen, Teun Siebers, and Tim Verbeij together with Loes Keijsers of Erasmus University.
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, digital trace data, and data donation. 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.
