Overview
Most research on social media and mental health relies on questionnaires asking people to reflect on the past week or month — but emotions shift across hours and social media habits change throughout the day, which is why EMA (ecological momentary assessment) is the right tool here: it captures lived experience as it happens, in real time, rather than relying on memory. Using this method, participants receive brief smartphone surveys five times a day for two weeks, each asking about their current emotional state and recent social media use. By analysing hundreds of observations per person, we can examine within-person patterns across the day, rather than relying on averages across groups. The study was awarded a grant from the Amsterdam University Fund and is actively recruiting.
What participants do
Participation takes place entirely on your own smartphone. Before the main study begins, participants complete a one-time baseline survey (around 30 minutes) covering general well-being, social media habits, and emotion regulation.
For two weeks, participants then receive five brief notifications per day at fixed times: 08:00, 12:00, 15:30, 18:30, and 22:00. Each takes about one minute — participants report how they feel right now and how they have been using social media in the past two hours. No lab visits, no complex tasks. Missing an occasional prompt is fine. Participants receive a reward at the end, with a bonus draw for those who complete 90% or more of prompts.
Three preregistered studies
This data collection supports three separate preregistered studies, each examining a different aspect of the same core question. All three were preregistered prior to data collection.
Affect and Problematic Social Media Use — Daily Dynamics
Examines concurrent and lagged associations between momentary affect and problematic social media use at both the prompt level (within a day) and the day level (across consecutive days), including whether emotion regulation difficulties moderate these associations.
Symptom-Level Pathways: Testing the I-PACE Model in Daily Life
Tests whether the pathway mechanisms proposed in the I-PACE model of behavioural addiction operate at the symptom level in daily life — specifically whether negative affect predicts cognitive-motivational social media symptoms (salience, withdrawal, tolerance, mood modification), and whether those in turn predict behavioural-executive symptoms (loss of control, conflict).
Temporal Symptom Networks of Problematic Social Media Use
An exploratory study mapping the temporal and contemporaneous symptom network of problematic social media use using multilevel vector autoregressive modelling, identifying which symptoms tend to predict which other symptoms across prompts, and which are most central in the network.
Status
Data collection is ongoing from May 2026 through May 2027. We are actively looking for schools, clinics, and youth institutions to help reach participants aged 16 to 21. If your organisation works with young people and would be interested in facilitating recruitment, please get in touch — we will visit in person and handle the full process.
Individual participants aged 16–21 who are interested in taking part can also contact us directly at djproject-fmg@uva.nl. Findings and publications will be shared here once available.