How Much is Too Much? Leveraging Existing and Emerging Large-Scale Social Data to Build Robust Evidence-Based Policy for Children in the Digital Age

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The amount of time British children and adolescents spend on digital technologies has more than doubled in the past decade, and debates about the possible impact of excessive screen use are prominent in the scientific and policy arenas, as well as in the public press. The UK House of Commons, DCMS, and Science and Technology Select Committees, the Royal Society for Paediatrics and Child Health, and the UK's Chief Medical Officer have recently investigated whether the Internet, smartphones, digital games, and social media influence the health of children and young people. These initiatives, however, have all acknowledged the lack of scientific knowledge in this area-which stymies the efforts of UK policy makers to craft effective advice, regulations, and interventions. This project aims-for the first time-to use existing ESRC datasets to generate the science required to ground policy in this area. We aim to provide policy-makers, parents, teachers, and GPs with the evidence required to understand the role digital technologies play in the lives of British children, and to highlight potential risk and resilience factors that could be the focus of future interventions. We will use ESRC data assets, advanced statistical approaches, and robust open science methodologies to answer three pressing research questions:1. What risk and resilience factors predispose adolescents to experiencing an effect of digital technology use on their psychological well-being? 2. What are the directional links between digital technology use and psychological well-being, and do the risk factors identified play a mediating role in this? 3. What are the causal pathways linking risk factors, digital technology use and psychological well-being that can inform future intervention? Answers to these questions are currently elusive, due to the poor data quality and methodological shortcomings that restrain research on technology effects. We will leverage our extensive experience working with large-scale social datasets to examine the general effects of digital technologies and more technology-specific effects (e.g. social media and gaming). We will use machine learning, network modelling, and advanced longitudinal approaches to pinpoint potential risk and resilience factors (e.g. social support, economic deprivation) that alter children's reactions to digital technologies, and which could help guide future technology policy. This will create different profiles of children that we can use to investigate the uses and effects of digital technologies over the longer-term-determining which possible technology effects (e.g. social isolation) are currently unevidenced and over-hyped, and which (e.g. poor sleep) deserve a closer look.We will thoroughly document our methodology and publish each detailed analysis behind our findings. This transparency is almost entirely missing from the current scientific and policy debate. Making our code freely available will enable other research teams in academia, the charity sector and government to build directly on our work, facilitating a new kind of incremental knowledge transfer which has hitherto been missing, and providing a template for empowering all sectors, including charities, to make more regular use of ESRC data. Crucially, this work will inform how our team continues to advise draft guidance under development at the UK Ministry of Health, ongoing deliberations at the UK Council of Internet Safety, UNICEF, OECD, social enterprises like the ParentZone, and children's charities including Barnardo's-with whom we already have a strong relationship. Our work will also provide a lens to understand the effects of novel technologies such as VR and AI, which will soon be measured by ESRC data. While VR and AI are still under the radar of most academic and policy debate, they will increasingly enter the discourse in coming years.