The Programme on Adolescent Well-Being in the digital age investigates how the Internet, social media platforms, and video games influence the mental health and psychosocial functioning of young people. This ambitious research programme is pursued by a team of behavioural scientist’s keen to collect, collate, and analyse the best possible data to gain evidence-based insights that are useful for health policymakers and technology regulators.
Our team is studying individual, national, and international trends in the mental well-being of young people to determine for who, how and why health is changing over time. Our goal is to determine what role, if any, the introduction, and adoption of digital technologies shape well-being dynamics.
Our work has three main components: (1) The collation and analysis of dozens of datasets including data on technology use and health spanning many decades and countries. (2) Meta scientific research to determine the reliability of existing evidence and creating new tools to draw robust causal inferences about technology effects. And (3) generating and evaluating the scientific value of large-scale datasets leveraging the power of open datasets with objective data shared by technology platforms.
Associate Professor, Senior Research Fellow
Project role: Principal Investigator
Professor Przybylski is an experimental psychologist at the OII. His work is mainly concerned with applying psychological models of motivation and health to study how people interact with virtual environments.
Postdoctoral Researcher
Project role: Co-Investigator
Matti Vuorre is an experimental psychologist. He applies his expertise in cognitive psychology and Bayesian modelling as a postdoctoral researcher in the Programme on Adolescent Well-Being in the Digital Age.
Postdoctoral Researcher
Project role: Co-Investigator
Niklas Johannes is a behavioural scientist. He works as a postdoctoral researcher in the Adolescent Well-Being in the Digital Age programme, where he studies effects of technology on well-being and performance.
With Professor Andrew Przybylski, Candice Odgers, and Professor John Horton
Professor Przybylski speaks one-on-one with Professor Candice Odgers (UC Irvine) in a virtual fireside chat moderated by Professor John Horton (MIT), discussing parenting, social media and mental health.
With Professor Andrew Przybylski, Julie Inman Grant, Tessy Ojo, Dr Catherine Steiner-Adair, and Laura Higgins
An esteemed panel convened by the Family Online Safety Institute discuss how the global pandemic and rise of online platforms interact to shape the mental health of young people.
With Professor Andrew Przybylski, and Dr Niklas Johannes
The OII hosts their Director of Research, Professor Andrew Przybylski, and Postdoctoral Researcher, Dr Niklas Johannes. They will discuss their recent ground-breaking study which revealed time spent playing video games can be good for your wellbeing.
28 March 2022
Girls and boys might be more vulnerable to the negative effects of social media use at different times during their adolescence, say an international team of scientists.
6 January 2022
Consuming traditional forms of media has little effect on short-term adult well-being, according to a new study by researchers from the University of Oxford, University of Vienna and Nesta.
5 December 2021
Academics from around the world urge Mark Zuckerberg to commit to better research on the mental health of children and adolescents in an open letter.
4 May 2021
A new Oxford University study examined data from over 430,000 adolescents in the UK and US to investigate how associations between adolescents’ technology use and mental health have changed over the past 30 years.
The Independent online, 30 March 2022
The link between screen time and mental health is not as clear as we think.
The Daily Mail, 28 March 2022
Major study reveals boys are most likely to be negatively affected between the ages of 14 and 15 – but girls are susceptible as young as 11.
The Telegraph, 21 March 2022
We assume phones get in the way – but as our writer finds in a rural Essex cabin, they can actually improve our holidays.
