Principal investigators: Amy Orben (PI), Laura Boeschoten, Daniel Oberski, Sebastian Kurten, Amanda Ferguson, Valerie Yap, Amelia Leyland-Craggs
Summary: The online world is still understudied. In particular, large cohort or household panel studies have failed to gather comprehensive digital data. Due to the extensiveness of their data collection efforts, it is often seen as too risky or burdensome to collect digital data about participants’ online lives, for example from platforms or phones. As a stop-gap solution many studies have, therefore, added select questionnaire items about digital behaviours. But these are unreliable and uninformative.
In the last five years there has been much progress in designing new data collection methodologies that make digital data collection easier. These have now reached a level of maturity that could see them introduced in large data collection efforts. They could even be developed further to become a net asset to such studies by boosting participant engagement and retention. This project will take one of these methodological innovations developed internationally (the Digital Data Donation infrastructure and its software port) and test its feasibility for deployment in the MRC UK Adolescent Health Study. It will also explore whether this method can be augmented to increase adolescent involvement and engagement, as well as provide ways to motivate teachers and schools to sign up to the MRC Adolescent Health Study in the first place.
Data collection period: March – May 2024
Participant recruitment: We visited 6 secondary schools in person to present this study opportunity. These schools were identified through searches on the Gov.uk website and through existing partnerships through previous studies with our lab and collaborators.
Instructions: Instructions to download TikTok data can be found here. Instructions to download Instagram data can be found here. We send participants an email with a unique link to the Next platform to perform the data access which can be found here.
Codebook: -
Ethical review: The ethics form, information sheet and consent forms were reviewed by Cambridge Psychology Research Ethics Committee. Participant information sheet can be found here and participant consent form can be found here.
Software: The data donations were collected using Port.
Local processing: The Python script for local processing of the TikTok and Instagram data are available on Github.
Data: Please contact the PI of this study.
Acknowledgements: This project was funded by SUAG/091 and SUAH/031.
