Social Media Use and Young People’s Mental Health: A Quantitative Social Science Approach

Research project description

A PhD position is available at the Families, inequality and social change (Department of Sociology from the Universitat Autònoma Barcelona – Centre for Demographic Studies) in collaboration with Trinity College Dublin – Trinity Centre for Global Health under the supervision of Pablo Gracia and Alina Cosma. We are looking for a highly motivated candidate that will investigate Social Media Use and Young People’s Mental Health.

Digital technologies are an integral part of adolescents’ mental health linked to different opportunities and risks. While several studies found that adolescent screen time correlates to poorer mental health (Kelly et al. 2018; Twenge et al. 2018), studies indicate that such associations largely depend on the context and type of social media engagement, as well as on methodological design (Bohnert & Gracia, 2023; Livingstone et al., 2020; Orben & Przybylski, 2019; Valkenburg et al., 2022). Overall, the mechanisms linking social media use to young people’s mental health remain unclear. We need innovative methodological approaches to examine heterogeneous and underlying mechanisms connecting social media use to young people’s mental health. This project will combine innovative quantitative approaches from sociology, demography, psychology and public health to address the following questions:

1.         How has the expansion of social media impacted young people’s mental health across different sociodemographic groups and societies?

2.         What are the causal mechanisms linking social media use to mental health from childhood to late adolescence?

The project will involve high-quality doctoral supervision from Autonomous University of Barcelona (i.e., the DEMOFAM group on Families, Well-Being and Inequalities) and Trinity College Dublin (i.e., Psychology and Global Health). The PhD project will apply a transdisciplinary approach with advanced quantitative methodologies applied to high-quality population-level data, such as longitudinal methodologies, computational methods, multi-level modelling, and causal inference designs. The successful candidate will be enrolled in the PhD Sociology doctoral program at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) in the framework of the TOUCH project. TOUCH (“Towards the next generatiOn of excellent yoUng doctoral researchers on mental health by developing an intersectoral & transdisciplinary approaCH”) is a new excellent doctoral programme co-funded by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie (MSCA) Actions of the European Commission and led by the UAB for the recruitment and training of 24 doctoral candidates in the field of mental health and wellbeing.

Academic background / Skills

The candidates must fulfil the following eligibility criteria from the EC: Mobility rule: candidates must not have resided or carried out their main activity (work, studies, etc.) in Spain for more than 12 months in the 36 months immediately preceding the deadline for the programme call. Experience rule: researchers must be doctoral candidates at the date of recruitment, i.e. not already in possession of a doctoral degree at the deadline of the open calls. Researchers who have successfully defended their doctoral thesis but have not yet formally awarded the doctoral degree will not be considered eligible. Candidates must hold a degree that allows admission to the official doctoral programme at UAB.

Additional requirements for a stronger application are:

• Background in relevant social science discipline (e.g., sociology, demography, psychology, public health, economics, human development, neuroscience);
• Excellent academic record to date;
• Exceptional skills in quantitative methods and advanced statistical modelling (e.g., longitudinal methods, structural equation modelling, multi-level methods, causal inference designs);
• Strong potential to provide novel scientific understandings of the links between social media use and young people’s mental health;
• High proficiency in relevant statistical software (e.g., R, Stata, Python);
• Willingness to innovate using pioneering and interdisciplinary quantitative and computational methods;
• Excellent written and verbal skills in English language;
• Ambition and ability to produce and publish high-quality research in social sciences;
• Ability to work independently and as part of a team.

Interested applicants are encouraged to contact the investigators for further information pablo.gracia@uab.cat

Research group/s description

Prof. Pablo Gracia (main supervisor) leads a team on “Families, Well-Being and Inequalities” within the larger DEMFAM group from the Centre for Demographic Studies. Having received over €3 million as leading (co)PI and participated in over 20 scientific projects, Prof. Gracia is currently the lead PI of the DIGINEQ project, funded by the European Research Council (CoG) (2024-2029) in which he supervises multiple PhDs and Postdocs to examine how social media use links to disparities and inequalities in adolescent well-being and mental health.

Dr. Alina Cosma (co-supervisor) leads a research group in Psychology and Global Health at Trinity College Dublin and has extensive experience in designing and managing cross-national school health surveys focused on adolescent health. Her research spans a variety of topics, including time trends and predictors of change in adolescent mental health (from within-country and cross-country), as well as the social and structural determinants of adolescent well-being.