Social Media and Adolescent Health Research Team: SMAHRT

Our mission as the Social Media & Adolescent Health Research Team is to advance society’s understanding of the relationships between media and adolescent health towards educating adolescents, providing better care, and developing innovations in adolescent healthcare.

Our values include:

• An interdisciplinary approach with emphasis on using ethical and sound research practices
• Partnering with other researchers, educators, clinicians and community members in the development and translation of our research findings
• A diverse and collaborative research team

Our vision is to provide education to adolescents and families towards safe internet use, to develop tools to assess internet use and define problematic internet use, and to both create and interpret messages within social media to promote healthy behaviors.

 

The majority of SMAHRT’s work focuses on three research cores:

Technology use and misuse

• The purpose of the technology use and misuse research core is to explore how technology use interacts with health outcomes relevant to adolescents and young adults, and to develop innovative methods for assessing technology use which can be used in research and clinical settings.
• Projects within this SMAHRT research core focus on the measurement of technology use in general and measurements and analyses of Problematic Internet Use (PIU) in particular.

Online safety

• The purpose of these projects is to investigate key issues in online safety, and to provide adolescents and their families with sound and relevant education on safe internet use in a meaningful and appealing manner. Towards this goal, we apply a transdisciplinary approach, which combines elements of public health, education, and consumer science.
• Projects within this SMAHRT research core include education and prevention approaches to internet safety and research on cyberbullying.

Social media

• Projects within this SMAHRT research core share the common goal of understanding displayed health behaviors on social media sites, and considering new ways to provide prevention and intervention programs using social media.