Problematic Social Media use among Italian mid-Adolescents: protocol and rationale of the SMART Project (Preprint)

BACKGROUND Social media (SM) use constitutes a large portion of mid-adolescents’ daily lives as a way of peer interaction. A significant percentage of adolescents experience intense or problematic social media use (PSMU), an etiologically-complex behavior potentially associated with psychological distress. To date, studies longitudinally testing for risk/protective factors of PSMU, and collecting qualitative data are still scarce among mid-adolescents. Self-help interventions specifically targeting PSMU in this population and involving mid-adolescents in cocreation are needed. OBJECTIVE The two-year SMART multicenter project aims to: (i) advance knowledge on PSMU; (ii) co-design an unguided self-help App for promoting awareness and functional SM use, (iii) test feasibility and provide preliminary findings on its effectiveness to further improve and adapt the App. METHODS The SMART project is organized in 3 phases: phase 1 will focus on knowledge advancement on PSMU and its risk and protective factors using a longitudinal design; phase 2 will explore adolescents perspectives using qualitative approach and will co-design an unguided self-help App for reducing PSMU, which will be evaluated and adapted in phase 3. Around 1500 mid-adolescents (14-18 years) will be recruited in northern, central and southern Italy to investigate the potential intra- and inter-personal psychological risk and protective factors for PSMU, define specific PSMU profiles and test for its association with psychological distress. Subjective (self-report) PSMU’s psycho-social risk/protective factors will be assessed at 3 different time points and Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) will be used. Moreover, focus groups will be performed in a subsample of mid-adolescents to collect the adolescents’ unique point of view on PSMU and their own experiences on SM. Those previous results will inform the self-help App, which will be co-designed through working groups with adolescents. Subsequently, the SMART App will be deployed and adapted, after testing its feasibility and potential effectiveness in a pilot study. RESULTS The project is funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research as part of a national grant (PRIN, “Progetti di Rilevante Interesse Nazionale”). The research team received an official notice of research funding approval in July 2023 (Project Code 2022LC4FT7). The project was preregistered on Open Science Framework (OSF; https://osf.io/2ucnk/; 24/11/2023), while the ethics approval was obtained in November 2023. We started the enrollments in December 2023, with the final follow-up data to be collected in March 2025. CONCLUSIONS The innovative aspects of the SMART project will deepen the conceptualization of PSMU and of its bio-psycho-social antecedents among mid-adolescents, with relevant scientific, technological, and socioeconomic impacts. The advancement of knowledge and the developed self-help App for PSMU will timely respond to mid-adolescents’ increased loneliness and psychological burden due to COVID-19 pandemic and humanitarian crisis. CLINICALTRIAL OSF: https://osf.io/2ucnk/ (24/11/2023)