Today’s young people live their lives online, with little distinction between the online and offline worlds. This makes social media a rich source of information on real world behaviour relevant to mental health in this age group. It is crucial that we understand the positive and negative consequences of growing up in a digital world, including how social media are used as a means for seeking support and providing help to peers.

This project aimed to develop the tools necessary to understand the causal impact of social media behaviour on mental health and provide a sound basis for the development of just-in-time nudges and peer interventions.

The team worked with a student focus group to develop an assessment framework to provide insights from digital footprint data from Twitter and Spotify. New software was developed to measure positive and negative mood using automated text messages on the Telegram messaging app. This allowed daily assessments of mood alongside digital footprint data, with a visualisation framework being developed for displaying summary information derived from digital footprint data in real time.

The next part of the research has been postponed due the COVID-19 and will be conducted once the team can collect data in more normal circumstances. Next steps will be to:

1. Link social media data and collect measures of mental health in student participants
2. Link data on student mental health collected to events in the academic calendar
3. Carry out qualitative text analysis of social media data to identify themes related to mental health in a student population, including help seeking and peer support
4. Collaborate with University leaders to develop a web-based interface to monitor the pulse of student mental health

Current outcomes

The work so far is proving useful in developing a software framework to allow Public Health Wales and the Welsh Government to use digital footprint and open data to monitor patterns of community support during the COVID-19 outbreak and prioritise aid.