What is your PhD project about?

“I’m trying to gain an understanding of how social media use affects adolescents, by looking at the subject from an interdisciplinary angle. For my first paper, I did an umbrella review, which is essentially a meta-review of 44 reviews and meta-reviews on the subject. By doing what's called a statistical power analysis, I examine the study design and methodologies employed in a study and if the related findings are substantiated. In other words, if the study has substantial power to detect an effect. I found that most studies about general use of social media lack the statistical power to say anything determinate about the subject. It is mostly only studies about problematic use of social media in relation to mental health issues, specifically in relation to depression, stress, and anxiety, that have enough statistical power for the findings to be robust. Of course, we can’t know the causal direction of the relationships between social media use and these mental issues: Are people who struggle with mental health issues more likely to use social media, maybe as a coping mechanism, or is it the social media use in itself that affects their well-being?”

How did you get interested in this subject?

“My academic background is kind of unusual, in that I have a diverse background ranging from both a BA in Cognitive Science and an MA in Behavioral Economics as well as Cognitive Semiotics, which is more related to Psychology and Linguistics. Being affiliated with different departments made me realize how different fields approach a topic method-wise. I believe that comparing different results from different disciplines, allows us to better understand the potential effects of social media use on adolescents.”
 
“During my MA in Behavorial Economics, around 2019, the public discourse on social media was very much focused on the sentiment of ‘the more time you spend on social media, the worse you’ll feel’. This didn’t take into account how people spend their time on social media, and if the way they use social media might affect their well-being, rather than it solely being dependent on the amount of time. There’s a difference between, for example, using social media for three hours daily and mainly using it to communicate with your friends, and in using it an hour daily, but that hour is spent looking at comparing yourself to influencers.”

What are you working on at the moment?

“At the moment I’m working on my second article, where I use machine learning to figure out if there's a way to predict why people participating in mental health studies drop out. In this case, I’m specifically looking at mental health studies that employ a diary-based method, where participants have to document their mental health during a given time period, to understand how social media might affect their wellbeing. In these studies, a participant has to consistently keep up with documenting their mental health and social media use, otherwise, the data won’t be sufficient for analyzing the effects. What I’m doing is looking at 7,000 variables and seeing which of these can most accurately predict which participants are likely to not keep up with their documentation.”

What other findings from your project do you find the most interesting or surprising so far?

“Most prior studies on dropout rates in relation to mental health and social media use focus on socioeconomic factors. Interestingly, a preliminary finding from my second article is that people dropping out or not consistently documenting their mental health and social media use is more determined by whether they don’t have a consistent sleep schedule, and if their mood as well as stress levels vary a lot.”

What do you look forward to working with in the future?

“Later in my PhD, I’ll do a quantitative discourse analysis, where I’m comparing the discourse around adolescent mental health and social media use as portrayed in Danish mainstream media outlets, to the discourse around this topic in the Danish Parliament. The goal is to see if the way mainstream media report on the topic affects how the topic is treated in policymaking and how the topic is treated as a political agenda. This could be very interesting, as there have been cases of news outlets exaggerating findings from studies, claiming that social media use worsens your mental health. It will be interesting to see if this type of framing has an actual effect on policy decisions.”