Youth & Social Media in the Americas

This is a sub-project of the large-scale Rights for Children and Youth Partnership (RCYP), where we examine children and youth social participation through the lens of social and traditional media. RCYP is Led by Dr. Henry Parada of Ryerson University, with funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and was designed to work with trusted partners in seeking to increase knowledge of factors that support or hinder the protection of children and youth rights in Central America, the Caribbean, and disproportionately represented populations in Canada. This project features a collaboration of research from universities, government, non-government, and international organizations.

Challenge

To date, little research has been done on the impacts of social media on youth well-being and human rights.To fill this knowledge gap in the Caribbean, Latin America and Canada this sub-project of the Rights for Children and Youth Partnership, on which Dr. Tilleczek is a Co-Principal Investigator, focuses on the extensive data that has been collected by our partners in the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Trinidad and Tobago around the use of social media by children and youth. We seek to develop a better understanding of how these young people are using social media and if/how their social media use affects their wellbeing (self-defined) and human rights (universal).

Outputs and Impacts

Project partners in each country conducted surveys, focus groups, and community meetings with youth participants and their community members, and content analysis of local social media to develop fulsome data sets from each region. Young Lives is in the process of reviewing this data to develop a variety of Knowledge Mobilization outputs to share with and engage youth, academic, public and decision-making audiences towards better understanding of the impacts of social media on youth wellbeing and human rights, and to further social and educational policy around informed use of digital technology.