Technological approaches to youth wellness.
This research project designs, develops, and evaluates novel smartphone applications, like SwagApp, that help youth explore and leverage their social networks to engage in collective action, and assess the impact of this action. From affiliation with social movements through the use of Twitter hashtags to collective organizing through Facebook, social computing tools have catalyzed new and exciting forms of civic engagement. However, youth can have difficulty navigating their social networks, which creates challenges for understanding and putting to use the social capital within their networks.
With Andrea Parker (Georgia Institute of Technology) and Brooke Foucault-Welles (Northeastern University), this research examines how interactive visualizations of youth’s social networks can help youth more effectively understand and put to use the social capital within their networks. Such visualizations may support civic engagement by easing access to the rich and complex information about social ties, helping youth evaluate the impact they have through online civic action, preparing them to make effective decisions about future activities.
We ran network analysis trainings as well as co-design workshops with youth aged 12-18 in order to design an app that facilitates youth learning about network science and use of their own social networks for civic engagement.
Principal Investigator
Andrea Parker
Co-Principal Investigators
Catherine D’Ignazio and Brooke Foucault-Welles
Student Researchers
Farnaz Irannejad Bisafar and Adrian Choi
Publications
- Adrian Choi, Catherine D’Ignazio, Brooke Foucault Welles, and Andrea G Parker. 2023. “Social Media as a Critical Pedagogical Tool: Examining the Relationship between Youths’ Online Sociopolitical Engagements and Their Critical Consciousness.” In Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 657, 1–25.
- Irannejad Bisafar, Farnaz, Brooke Foucault Welles, Catherine D’Ignazio, and Andrea G. Parker. “Supporting Youth Activists? Strategic Use of Social Media: A Qualitative Investigation of Design Opportunities.” Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 4, no. CSCW2 (2020): 1-25.
Website
sites.gatech.edu/wellnesstechlab/ research/social-computing-supports-for-youth-civic-engagement/
Location
Northeast and Georgia, US
Funder
National Science Foundation