My name is Caroline Pitt and I'll be discussing our work on "The Kids Are /Not /Sort of All Right:
Technology's complex role in teen well-being during COVID-19"
So why teens?
Well, 20 percent of teens live with a mental health condition and
50 percent of lifetime mental health problems are established by age 14.
There are specific aspects of stay-at-home measures, such as those that have been
implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic that may place adolescents at particular risk
because of where they are developmentally.
Also, spending so much time at home may make it difficult to develop autonomy.
While spending less time with friends may make it difficult to nurture peer
relationships that are so important to the development of identity and intimacy.
Also what role does technology play in all of this?
So, in this study we wanted to explore how Seattle-area teens were affected by the pandemic.
Thus, our research questions: How are Seattle-area teens coping amid the coronavirus pandemic?
What role is technology playing in this context? And: What technology-enabled strategies
can support teen well-being and resilience during stressful life events?
To explore these questions, we conducted a study from April to August of 2020 with 21
Seattle-area teens. Each participant did an initial interview about their experiences
in terms of school, friends, family, technology, and so on, followed by 10 weeks of ecological
momentary assessments or EMAs three times per week asking about their feelings and tech habits.
Then, a second interview had them reflect on their experiences.
Lastly, participants were invited to an exploratory participatory design
session focused on emergent themes and problem spaces from the study.
Interviews and design sessions were analyzed via qualitative coding, while the EMAs were analyzed
in R with appropriate statistical tests and mixed linear models documented in detail in the paper.
To track teens' subjective well-being we asked teens multiple times a week how they're feeling
today on a scale from zero to a hundred. What you see here is a panel of individual
growth plots charting how each teen reported feeling between April and August. As you can see,
there's quite a lot of variety. Some teens are feeling quite positive, some are a bit lower
overall, and some showed quite a bit of spread over time. We saw the same type of variation
in teens daily reports of how worried lonely and connected they felt on a day-to-day basis.
We also measured teens' life satisfaction at the
start and end of the study via a standard life satisfaction scale.
As you can see here, there is a small but statistically significant increase between
April and August. But perhaps more noteworthy is the large amount of variation between teens
at both time points. Some teens are definitely doing quite a lot better than others overall.
The pandemic was not the only source of stress mentioned by teens. They also included:
online school, missing friends, family tensions,
and pre-existing mental health challenges such as anxiety and depression.
To give you a sense of how differently some of the teens responded to the pandemic...
One participant said "I'm kind of a stress-free person, a lot of time
it's pretty much as stress-free as it can be." This boy noted that his parents were
still employed and all of his relatives were healthy, therefore he thought he had nothing
to worry about. This stance stood in stark contrast to another teen in our study who had
pre-existing anxiety and depression. This teen said "COVID-19 has one of
the been one of the biggest panic attack causers that I've ever had."
In terms of technology use, teens who rated their time with technology as more satisfying on one day
tended to report higher levels of affective well-being the next day.
So what exactly made for a more or less satisfying technology experience for each teen?
An experience that meets at least one psychological need!
Three important psychological needs we saw in the data were: autonomy, as in a sense of initiative;
competence, a feeling of mastery; and then relatedness, a feeling of connection to others.
Relatedness came up quite a bit in the interviews and in the design sessions later on.
So here are a few quick takeaways from the study: Many non-tech factors affect well-being and thus
a whole ecological context should be considered. Meaning matters much more than time in terms of
technology use. And meaningful technology use meets at least one psychological need if not more.
Thank you so much for listening and please dive into the paper for more on
these findings in greater detail. I'd like to thank my co-authors, our participants,
and of course essential health care workers for their efforts. Thank you and have a wonderful day