2019 Manners Awardees
Hamilton  ·  Perry

“Using Smartphones to Understand Social Media Use and Sleep among Adolescents”

Jessica Hamilton, PhD

Postdoctoral Scholar
Department of Psychiatry
University of Pittsburgh

ABSTRACT:   Insufficient sleep has increased among adolescents in recent years, which is a robust risk factor for poor mental health outcomes including depression and suicide. The advent and growth of social media (SM) use in this population has been linked to shorter sleep duration and more sleep disruption. Yet, current research is limited by both cross-sectional and self-report methods, which limits our ability to understand the directionality of these relationships and objective impact of SM use on sleep outcomes. Innovative methods are needed to objectively capture SM use and sleep to more rigorously test these relationships, which can inform policy, research, and clinical care involving adolescents. The ubiquity of smartphones provides a unique opportunity to capture and detect SM use and sleep in real time and as they occur in the real-world, free from retrospective reports and self-report biases. With 95% of teens now owning smartphones, nearly all teens possess an easy, rich, and accessible tool for unobtrusive data collection using in-phone sensors. The proposed study seeks to leverage smartphones to better understand the relationships between SM use and sleep among adolescents. Given the novelty of this area, the proposed pilot study will passively collect data from adolescents’ smartphone sensors to examine SM use and sleep patterns, and evaluate these associations overall and on a day-to-day among adolescents. The proposed study aims to collect data from 25 adolescents over 4 weeks to: 1) examine the feasibility of using smartphone sensors to assess SM use and sleep among adolescents; 2) test the accuracy of using smartphone sensors to detect sleep patterns, and 3) evaluate the associations between SM use and sleep overall and on a day-to-day basis among adolescents. Data collected from the pilot study will be critical to establish feasibility and proof-of-concept for this work. These results have the potential to inform future research and policies aimed towards understanding and modifying adolescent behaviors around SM use and sleep. This work also may have valuable implications for subsequent studies aiming to develop scalable, high-impact interventions using smartphones with adolescents. We believe that results from this and future studies will have important implications for mental health, education, and policy.

"Emotional Awareness in Child Welfare Professionals and its Relationship with Emotional Variability, Compassion Satisfaction, and Commitment to the Field: A Pilot Study Utilizing Ecological Momentary Assessment "

Marlo Perry, PhD
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Research Assistant Professor
School of Social Work  
University of Pittsburgh

ABSTRACT:  The research literature is replete with studies investigating negative sequelae of working in child welfare, including vicarious trauma, compassion fatigue, and burnout. However, we know less about compassion satisfaction and restorative interactions that child welfare professionals have and how they relate to professional quality of life and intent to remain in the field. This study will utilize ecological momentary assessment (EMA) to capture the variability of daily interactions of child welfare caseworkers, along with their emotional responses to those interactions. This mechanism will allow us to understand how different contexts and/or interaction types result in different emotional responses on a day-to-day basis. We are particularly interested in positive, restorative interactions in the field and how we may be able to support them and/or increase their frequency. To this end, we will assess elements of emotional health, including emotional labor, mindfulness, empathy, and energy recovery. We hypothesize that strengths in these areas will be related to more frequent positive interactions, which, in turn may contribute to commitment to the field. Since elements of emotional intelligence can be taught, this understanding can help inform interventions that can support the child welfare workforce, and, ideally, contribute to retention in the field. A random sample of participants will engage in a brief, mobile mindfulness application with the goal of learning more about the feasibility and utility of such a mechanism with this population, as well as to see what, if any, impact it has on daily emotional reactions and overall mindful awareness. Through our work with Pennsylvania’s Child Welfare Resource Center, findings from this project have the potential to impact the entire child welfare workforce in Pennsylvania by introducing low-cost, portable interventions that can improve worker emotional health within a service system characterized by high stress, crucial responsibility, and pronounced public accountability.