Doing it for the kids

As well as boasting the largest dataset in the world around young people’s mobile phone use, SCAMP is notable for its breadth of scope. And as the study develops, it’s possible to ask a much wider set of questions beyond mobile phone use, to ask about air pollution, noise pollution and exposure to green space.

But what makes it really special is the way it engages with its research subjects. The Mohn Centre is a transdisciplinary research centre that addresses childhood health challenges in urban environments. Here, young people are seen not just as passive study participants, but as research co-creators in their own right.

However, this isn’t always easy to accomplish – at least not in the representative way one might hope. As Toledano notes, the young people who volunteer to take part typically come from higher socioeconomic backgrounds. That leaves whole pockets of society who don’t get their voices heard in research.

To address this, the Mohn Centre focuses heavily on community engagement. It works with a range of local organisations, with a view to breaking down the barriers to wider involvement. These include Nova New Opportunities, a charity that supports families local to White City.

“If you’ve got an issue that affects young people, it’s only through working with young people that you can understand whether what you’re doing is relevant,” says Matthew Barnett, head of Nova’s Family Programme. “If young people aren’t fully involved in what they do, it’s very disempowering, and it doesn’t lead to the most meaningful outcomes.”

Nova has worked with the Mohn Centre on various initiatives, not least a series of short films in which young people documented their views about the urban environment. “This was a good way of seeing the area through the eyes of the children who live there,” says Barnett. “The subjects the young people talked about were very similar to the issues we’re hearing day to day. They were very concerned about litter or the lack of greenery, or things looking dirty or broken.”

They also voiced concerns about phone addiction and the online environment. More often than not, they are critical of excessive phone use. “We might expect young people would be very defensive of their smartphones. But in the consultations we have held, that isn’t really the case,” he says.

As the SCAMP study progresses, we can expect to see more consensus around these themes. Already, the study has returned several important findings, including that social media use is associated with increased behavioural problems and lower health-related quality of life, but the latter only in girls. Another is that screentime before bed may put adolescents at risk of poor sleep.

“The nuance here is if people are using phones or watching TV in a room with a light on, they’re more likely to get insufficient sleep, but the risk increases massively if they’re doing that activity in the dark,” says Smith.

There are many more research angles remaining to be probed. Mia Ward and David Fierros are A-level students at Chislehurst & Sidcup Grammar School in south-east London. Together with six of their peers, they took part in the SCAMP Research Challenge – a new wave of the SCAMP study that enables students to lead the research effort in their schools. They were trained to design projects, develop research questions, and collect and analyse data.

“We came up with a research question to study, then we set out to apply that and collected biometric data from other people in our school,” says Ward. “In our case, we decided to look at how the internet and social media affect people’s emotional abilities and eating habits.”

The data collection procedure was rigorous – “we collected urine samples, for the greater good,” laughs Fierros – and Ward says that keeping everyone organised was a lot to handle. But while remaining honest about the challenges, both students wax lyrical about the benefits. “I’d definitely recommend it, especially to anyone planning on studying psychology or biology at university,” says Ward. “It’s really interesting to take part in research that could go on to be published, especially because our findings may affect us directly.”

SCAMP researchers, including Thompson and Curtis, are now working with a new set of student teams to co-design an intervention for young people’s mental health. The research questions are directly based on the students’ experiences – an exciting and innovative feature – and there’s a mutual benefit to the arrangement, in that the students have something valuable to add to their CVs.

“Especially since COVID, schools have got a lot going on, and teachers are very busy,” says Smith. “We try to have a reciprocal approach – at a basic level that might be compensating people for their time in the form of a voucher, but we might also give young people experiences that can enhance their skills and careers.”