The Design of Project AWeSome

In a first step, we interviewed 30 adolescents. These interviews provided initial insights into the terms and expressions used by adolescents to describe their social media activities and emotional experiences.

The qualitative interviews also gave us a feel for how adolescents use social media. We learned, for example, that (a) Facebook was “for older generations”, that (b) each platform was used differently by different adolescents, and that (c) many adolescents considered and used gaming as a social medium.

In a second step, we conducted a national representative survey among 1,000 Dutch adolescents, which was fielded by a national survey institute [1]. This national survey functioned as a benchmark for the experience sampling method (ESM) studies and surveys.

We also used the national survey to identify the most popular social media among Dutch adolescents and to investigate the frequency with which they used these social media.

Finally, we obtained insight in the frequency per activity on each platform. Such insights are important to understand what can be measured in an ESM study. For instance, it is not feasible to measure social media activities that occur too infrequently in an ESM study.

[1] van Driel, I.I., et al., 'Posten, scrollen, appen en snappen': Jongeren (14-15 jaar) en social media in 2019. 2019, Universiteit van Amsterdam: Center for Research on Children, Adolescents, and the Media (CcaM).

In a final step, we developed the ESM measures, based on the insights from the interviews, the national survey, and theoretical and empirical insights from earlier studies.

In a study among 63 Dutch adolescents, we piloted our ESM measures, the study procedure, the sampling scheme, and monitoring procedure. This pilot study yielded reliable data and was published in Nature Scientific Reports [1]. The data of this study are available on Figshare.  

[1] Beyens, I., et al., The effect of social media on well-being differs from adolescent to adolescent. Scientific Reports, 2020. 10: p. 10763.

The longitudinal cohort study ran from November 2019 to June 2020. During this period, a group of 388 middle adolescents (13- to 15-year-olds) were intensively investigated with different research methods. See the question below for a more detailed explanation on the  different research parts. 

In this ESM study, which was fielded in November and December 2019, each adolescent was asked to fill out six daily ESM surveys, totaling to 126 per adolescent. Adolescents completed the ESM surveys using the Ethica Data App on their own smartphone. We measured adolescents’ social media activities, their self-esteem, loneliness, well-being, distractibility, and their closeness to their friends.

From November 2019 to June 2020, we administered 16 biweekly surveys. These surveys included multiple state and trait measures, for example of well-being, friendship support, and parenting.

Some of these survey measures are planned to be included as moderators in our models, for instance, to investigate which adolescents are more susceptible to the effects of social media activities than others. Other measures will be used to investigate the longer-term effects of social media use.

In the second three-week ESM study, which was fielded in June 2020, we again asked adolescents to fill out six daily ESM surveys, totaling to 126 measurements per person.

Some of the measures of the second ESM wave, such as well-being and self-esteem, were identical to the first ESM wave. Others were different. In comparison to the first ESM wave, the second one was focused more on self-regulation and parent-child communication.

During the second ESM wave, we collected digital trace data of adolescents’ app usage and screen time among a subsample of Android users using the Ethica App Usage Stream and Ethica Data App.

A subsample of adolescents shared their Instagram archives, which include their posts, stories, and comments.

All steps in the design, sampling, and data collection procedures of the project are published and made available online. All materials and code are published at OSF.

All studies, including their hypotheses, research questions, and analysis plans are preregistered at OSF before testing the hypotheses and conducting data analyses related to the research plan.

Any existing insights into the data are fully disclosed in the preregistrations (e.g., assessment of psychometric properties or insights based on analyses for other manuscripts). And any deviations from the preregistrations (e.g., non-feasibility of the preregistered analysis plan, unforeseen circumstances) are fully disclosed in our publications.

As an additional open science practice, preprints of our papers are published online at PsyArXiv and made available on our website and/or ResearchGate.

An overview of all publications and preprints that resulted from our project can be found at our website. All our journal articles are published open access and are made freely available online.

Finally, together with each (published) paper, we upload an anonymized dataset on Figshare. This enables fellow researchers to reproduce and verify our analyses and replicate our studies.

We publish our data under a restrictive license. This means that the data can be accessed but may not be reused without our explicit permission.