Today’s youth are spending an increasing amount of time in online spaces, such as social media sites, gaming platforms, and online learning environments. Although current discourse has mostly focused on the negative impacts these spaces have on character development and wellbeing, this is at odds with research suggesting that online spaces may not have a large negative impact on youth. Given the current centrality of technology to the social, emotional, and educational lives of youth today, it is important that we understand how such online spaces can be used to support character formation, which may in turn have a positive impact on their wellbeing.
This project will develop and test micro-interventions designed specifically for online spaces focused on character virtues of compassion, humility, gratitude, and curiosity. The selected virtues were chosen based on their ability to mitigate common risks that youth face in online spaces, their link to wellbeing, and their potential to help youth navigate online spaces more skillfully. Our micro-interventions will build on established approaches to support wellbeing in online contexts and recent work applying principles from personality dynamics to character formation interventions.
In this project we will: (1) develop a suite of micro-interventions for online spaces specifically focused on character development, (2) evaluate the impact of these interventions on youth in three deployment settings – social media, online games, and learning environments, and (3) disseminate learnings from these interventions to diverse audiences through our established partnerships and academic venues.
