Harnessing digital data to study 21st-century adolescence

几乎每个英国孩子都生活在离线和在线世界中。就像他们每天去上学一样，他们也每天都在网络环境中工作。Ofcom最近收集的一项数据显示，英国16岁的年轻人平均每天上网时间约为4小时54分钟。在美国，46%的13-17岁的年轻人说他们“几乎经常”上网，而另外48%的人说他们“每天上网几次”（皮尤，2022）。如果我们想了解这个数字时代的青少年健康，我们需要收集足够的数据，了解他们在上网时所做的事情，看到的东西和经历。我们需要这样做，因为在线活动会影响一系列身心健康因素。例如，在网上看到自我伤害的内容可能会影响一个刚刚在学校度过艰难一天的脆弱青少年的心理健康。另一方面，TikTok的某些趋势可能会影响另一个青少年的活动水平或他们的饮食，从而影响他们的身体健康。此外，年轻人在网上找到的社区可以成为支持的来源，特别是对于那些已经在健康问题上挣扎的人。然而，目前没有大的英国数据收集投资针对青少年充分收集有关这些过程中的任何数据。许多人仅仅依靠问卷来了解网络世界。例如，他们询问青少年在社交媒体上花费多少时间。然而，花在数字环境中的时间并不能很好地反映其影响，因为我们不知道青少年在网上看到或做了什么。此外，青少年在估计他们在数字平台上花费的时间方面非常糟糕，这使得目前的问卷测量非常不可靠。那么，我们如何充分捕捉与数字环境的互动，以更好地了解青少年健康？在过去几年中，通过各种国际赠款开发的一种特别有前途的方法是“数字数据捐赠”。数字数据捐赠使用我们的数据权利;作为数字平台的用户，我们有权从这些平台请求我们的数据，然后可以自由地与我们想要的任何人分享。为了允许我们行使这些权利，大多数数字平台都在其网站上推出了“下载您的数据”页面或服务。我们团队中的一些人（Co-Is Boeschoten和Oberski）已经在荷兰开发了基础设施，以道德和隐私增强的方式使用这些数据下载包来收集研究数据。这提供了一个机会，探讨是否可以使用这种基础设施来收集重要的数据，在青少年健康研究。在这个项目中，我们将完成四个工作流程来实现这一目标。首先，我们将从年轻人那里获得关于数据捐赠基础设施的反馈，并在课堂数据收集环境中测试其可行性。我们将探索一个研究问题，在整个项目中作为我们共同研究者的年轻人将帮助选择。其次，我们将探索如何不仅从年轻人那里收集数字数据，而且还将其反馈给他们有趣和互动的数据可视化。我们将与年轻人和软件工程师合作，探索什么是可能的和有趣的，最终开发出这个数据反馈工具的原型。第三，这种数据反馈工具也可以用于课堂环境，例如，当教师提供数字扫盲课程时。我们将咨询教师，并制定一个课程计划草案，将数字数据捐赠和数据反馈工具相结合。这可以用来激励学校和教师参与更广泛的青少年健康研究。第四，我们将利用我们在这个项目和我们的其他工作中学到的东西，提供一份简报文件，列出各种数字数据收集方法的利弊，这些方法可用于为青少年健康研究和其他未来工作提供信息。

Almost every child in the UK is now living in both offline and online worlds. Just as they go to school every day, they also engage in online environments on a daily basis. A recent data collection by Ofcom showed that an average UK 16-year-old reports spending about 4 hours and 54 minutes a day online. In the USA, 46% of young people aged 13-17 say they are online 'almost constantly' while another 48% say they are online 'several times a day' (Pew, 2022). If we want to understand adolescent health in this digital age, we need to collect adequate data about what they do, see, and experience when spending time online. We need to do so because online activities can influence a range of mental and physical health factors. For example, seeing self-harm content online could impact the mental health of a vulnerable adolescent who has just had a very difficult day at school. On the other hand, certain TikTok trends could impact another adolescent's activity levels or what they eat, impacting their physical health. Further, the communities young people find online can be a source of support, especially for those already struggling with their health. However, currently no large UK data collection investment targeting adolescents is adequately collecting data about any of these processes. Many rely only on questionnaires to understand the online world. For example, they ask how much time teenagers spend on social media. However, time spent engaging with digital environments is not a good indicator of their impact, as we do not know what adolescents are seeing or doing online. Further, teenagers are very bad at estimating the time they spend on digital platforms, making current questionnaire measures woefully unreliable.So how do we adequately capture interaction with digital environments to better understand adolescent health? One of the methods that has been especially promising and that has been developed in the past years through a variety of international grants is "Digital Data Donation". Digital Data Donation uses our data rights; as users of digital platforms, we are entitled to request our data from these platforms and are then free to share it with anyone we want. To allow us to exercise these rights, most digital platforms have introduced 'download your data' pages or services on their sites. Some in our team (Co-Is Boeschoten and Oberski) have developed infrastructure in The Netherlands to use these data download packages in an ethical and privacy enhancing fashion to collect data for research. This offers an opportunity to explore whether this infrastructure could be used to collect important data in the Adolescent Health Study. In this project we will complete four workstreams to achieve this goal. First, we will get feedback from young people about the data donation infrastructure and test its feasibility in a classroom data collection environment. We will explore a research question that young people acting as our co-investigators throughout the project will help choose. Second, we will explore how we can not only collect digital data from young people, but also feed it back to them in fun and interactive data visualisations. We will work with young people and software engineers to explore what is possible and interesting, to ultimately develop a prototype of this data feedback tool. Third, this data feedback tool could also be used in a classroom environment, e.g., when teachers provide digital literacy lessons. We will consult teachers and develop a draft lesson plan integrating digital data donation and the data feedback tool. This could be used to motivate schools and teachers to engage in the broader Adolescent Health Study. Fourth, we will use what we learnt both in this project and in our other work to provide a briefing document setting out the pros and cons of a variety of digital data collection methods that can be used to inform the Adolescent Health Study and other future work.