Why is it that social media use makes some adolescents feel happy while leaving others feeling blue? Project AWeSome (Adolescents, Well-being & Social Media) aims to answer this and other questions about the relationship between adolescents’ social media use and their well-being. Project AWeSome is an interdisciplinary collaboration between the Universities of Amsterdam and Tilburg that launched in Fall 2018.
The project team consists of UvA and CcaM researchers Patti Valkenburg, Ine Beyens, Loes Pouwels, Irene van Driel, Teun Siebers, and Tim Verbeij together with Loes Keijsers of Tilburg University. The aim of the project is to unravel individual differences in the effects of social media use on various aspects of the wellbeing of Dutch youth. AWeSome’s person-specific paradigm will help to reveal which positive or negative consequences of social media use hold for which individual adolescents.
Project AWeSome incorporates theoretical approaches from the fields of communication science and developmental psychology and relies on intensive longitudinal data collection methods, including survey, experience sampling, and physiological measurements. Advanced statistical modelling techniques will be used to analyze the short- and long-term effects of social media use on the wellbeing of each individual adolescent.
The positive connotation of Project AWeSome is meant to emphasize the potential helpful impact that the result of the project may have on parents, teachers, policy makers, and, last but not least, adolescents themselves. To learn more about this project, please email
