Document text
Principal Investigator: Melissa Juliana DuPont
Organization: COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY HEALTH SCIENCES
Fiscal Year: 2024
Award: $163,665
Funding agency: National Institute of Mental Health
PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT
We propose a two-part integrated mixed-methods project to help improve our understanding of the social media
landscape for adolescents, especially those with mental illnesses, and further accountability of new technology.
Research has documented a concurrent adolescent mental health crisis with mixed effects of the potential role
of social media: social media has become an important source of mental health information for the public yet
unsafe content is also prevalent such as stigma, cyber-bullying, and hate speech. Efforts designed to study
social media have produced only limited success owing to how social media data is dynamic and unique for each
user and privately owned/managed in the tech sector; no national/public archive exists. Further, web-scraping
methods (e.g., Twitter API) do not yield representative or random samples for study, and web-scraping and
survey methods are not yet available for the most popular apps among adolescents of Instagram, Snapchat, and
TikTok, or for capturing content in Spanish, limiting both internal and external validity. Extant efforts are thus
incongruent with how Latino adolescents use social media more than all other race/ethnic and age groups in the
U.S. New approaches are needed that address these methodological problems in a comprehensive fashion that
is informed by research and suited to the ecological context surrounding diverse adolescent populations.
Responding to this critical need, the proposed project seeks a rigorous test, with long term follow-up, participatory
approaches, and both quantitative and qualitative methods. Also, to gain new causal insights and further mental
health equity goals, this project focuses on Latinos ages 13-20 to leverage natural counterfactual contexts across
their diverse language/cultural social media exposure. Specifically, we will examine the effects of exposure to
mental health promoting (Aim 1) and pejorative (Aim 2) content encountered on social media on mental health
status, and how this relationship operates via proposed mediators of mental illness stigma, self-perceptions, and
help-seeking. Moderation by individual (e.g., age, gender, race), family (e.g., cohesion), and peer (e.g., social
support) factors will be assessed, and by mental health status to identify directionality (Aim 3). Achieved in two
parts, Part 1 is a prospective cohort design (N=1200) of three biweekly assessments of social media use and its
mental health content, potential mediators, modifiers/covariates, and mental health status. Part 2 involves Youth
Participatory Action Research (N=50) with SocialsVoice, an adaptation of PhotoVoice, to glean a culturally
relevant social media database for community-based analysis. The generated knowledge from the evaluation of
data in Parts 1-2 will together inform recommendations for intervention by identifying specific problems and target
populations with respect to social media and mental health, cuing how to best leverage the strengths of
adolescent ecological contexts to innovatively promote mental health. The proposed project and team to
implement it will provide public mental health with critical new knowledge it sorely needs to inform programs,
policies, and practices concerning the safety and utility of social media as it relates to population mental health.
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