Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Medicine and Public Health have partnered with Facebook in a $1 million study on the correlation between social media use and mental health in teenagers.
Dr. Megan Moreno, a UW-Madison professor and head of the Social Media and Adolescent Health Research Team (SMAHRT), will begin work on the project this semester. With Moreno at its helm, the project moved its headquarters from Seattle to Madison last fall.
“Today’s adolescents live in a highly technological society,” Moreno wrote in a statement. “Each day, they are faced with decisions on how to balance relationships, influences, and experiences both online and offline. I feel fortunate to work with amazing clinical colleagues and a dynamic research team to help teens through these challenges, and consider ways in which technology may provide new venues for education, support, and care of our adolescent patients.”
The project aims to monitor the way teens use — and also misuse — social media, to study the effectiveness of online safety mechanisms and to analyze the influence of social media on teens’ behavior, according to SMAHRT’s website.
“Our goal is to advance society’s understanding of the relationship between media and adolescent health towards educating adolescents, providing better care, and developing innovations in adolescent healthcare,” the organization stated on its website.
Facebook has been scrutinized by academics, government officials and even by leaders within the company, who say that the social media platforms it operates have fundamentally changed communication and behavioral patterns.
In December 2017, company researchers acknowledged that their website can lead to feelings of exclusion and disengagement.
“In general, when people spend a lot of time passively consuming information — reading but not interacting with people — they report feeling worse afterward,” the authors wrote. “Another theory is that the internet takes people away from social engagement in person.”
