Digital Time Use, Adolescent Well-Being and Social Inequalities

Introduction

In our highly unequal and digitalised world, understanding how adolescents’ digital lives intersect with social inequalities is critical. Research has consistently shown that adolescents from privileged socioeconomic backgrounds are advantaged in their academic, health, and socioemotional outcomes. However, how adolescents’ digital engagement relates to social inequalities in well-being is poorly understood. DIGINEQ significantly contributes to closing this major scientific gap.

Project Objectives

The project applies an innovative 24-hour time-use approach that brings a complex understanding of how exactly adolescents’ digital time use shapes social inequalities in well-being in daily life. DIGINEQ has three main objectives:

1. To understand how changes in digital engagement from childhood to late adolescence explain socioeconomic disparities in well-being outcomes.
2. To disentangle how exactly adolescents’ digital time use forms social inequalities in their well-being in everyday life.
3. To establish if digital interventions can promote adolescents’ healthy digital engagement and improve well-being outcomes, while reducing socioeconomic gaps in these areas.

Scientific Innovations

By adopting a novel approach that combines multiple disciplines and methodologies, this project brings three major scientific innovations:

1. It creates an innovative method based on mobile-app data to accurately track adolescents’ exact digital time use and measure socioeconomic gaps in well-being in real time.
2. It implements a novel mixed-method digital intervention to show if digital self-efficacy programmes can promote adolescents’ healthy digital engagement and improve well-being outcomes, while reducing related socioeconomic gaps.
3. It merges existing high-quality longitudinal time-diary data from three large-scale surveys in Australia, Ireland, and the United States to illustrate how adolescents’ digital time use explains socioeconomic gaps in well-being from childhood to late adolescence.