A groundbreaking new study conducted by the University of South Florida (USF) will track young people through 2050 to learn more about the long-term impacts of smartphones, social media and other digital media on individual well-being.
Though the long-term research will be conducted over the next 25 years, data collected every six months will give ongoing insight to parents, teachers, researchers, health care providers and others on the impact of digital media use on children and as they age into adults.
“We have research from other fields that tracks people across decades, looking at cardiovascular health or work-life balance across the lifespan. We don’t have that yet for digital media use and wellness,” said Justin Martin, the Eleanor Poynter Jamison chair in Media Ethics & Press Policy at USF St. Petersburg and lead researcher of the study.
The Life in Media Survey will collect insights and experiences from thousands of 11 to 13-year-olds as they pertain to digital media. Researchers will then track the same participants over decades to determine how digital media use impacts and changes attitudes, behaviors and health throughout their lives.
The survey will cover topics such as social media use and addiction, cyberbullying, news consumption, streaming services, parental controls, media literacy, artificial intelligence and more. Examining responses and patterns over time, researchers will discover possible connections between device ownership and time spent on social media with the prevalence of sleep deprivation, anxiety, depression and other critical wellness indicators.
Some 1,500 Florida youth took the survey in November to provide researchers with baseline data. Findings and insights from this cohort will be published in a report in the spring of 2025.
Informed by the pilot survey, the research team will then start a nationwide, long-term survey for up to 9,000 children as young as 11, when nearly half of children in the U.S. do not yet own a smartphone. Researchers will survey these children twice a year, once during the school year and again in the summer.
Although there has been a lot of snapshot research on the effects of digital media on everything from political discourse to social development, there are few conclusive findings and no long-term study tracking digital media use and well-being from childhood into adulthood.
The research team comprises experts across various disciplines, including journalism, psychology, public health, political science, sociology and communications. USF is also collaborating on the research with the Poynter Institute for Media Studies and its MediaWise initiative, which empowers young people with media literacy skills.
Learn more at www.usf.edu.
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