Tech & Society Lab | Collaborative Reviews

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Collaborative Reviews

When Jon and Zach began studying the effects of social media on teen mental health, they found that it was difficult to keep track of the many conflicting studies. In 2019, they created our first ‘collaborative review’ Google doc to organize the evidence and gather feedback from other researchers. Since then, we have created a review document each time we explore a new topic, from mental health trends in East Asia to the effects of digital technology on older adults.

Our publicly visible documents make it easy for anyone to acquaint themselves with the research literature on the many topics listed below. Categorized by method and/or result, they offer the abstract and a direct link to each study. We invite academic researchers to request commenting access for any of the docs and then add studies, comments, and objections. 

COLLABORATIVE REVIEW DOCS

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  • Adolescent Mood Disorders Since 2010: A Collaborative Review 
    This document collects and organizes dozens of published studies documenting changes in adolescent mental health in the USA and UK in the 21st century.
  • Social Media and Mental Health: A Collaborative Review 
    This document collects and organizes dozens of published studies addressing whether social media is a major cause of the rapid rise in adolescent depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide in the USA and UK since the early 2010s.
  • Social Media and Political Dysfunction: A Collaborative Review 
    This document collects and organizes more than a hundred published studies that address the question of whether social media is a major contributor to the rise of political dysfunction and the decline of democratic health that occurred in the USA and other Western democracies in the 2010s.
  • The Effects of Phone-Free Schools: A Collaborative Review 
    This document collects and organizes the published studies and essays addressing the questions: (1) What do we know about phone-free schools’ social, educational, and mental health impacts? And (2) how can elementary and middle schools best manage smartphone use during the school day?
  • What is Happening to Boys? A Collaborative Review 
    This document collects and organizes more than a hundred published essays and studies that address what is happening to the mental health [and well-being] of boys and young men in the U.S. and how are these changes related, if at all, to the mass migration of social life onto digital platforms since the early 2000s ? 
  • Free Play and Mental Health: A Collaborative Review 
    This document collects and organizes the published studies addressing the question: would more free play, especially in elementary school, reduce rates of depression and anxiety disorders? The decline of free play may be a large part of the backstory of the teen mental health crisis that began around 2012. This is the beginning of a collaborative review; we have not yet sent it out for contributions and critiques from other scholars.
  • Impacts of Educational Technology on Learning
    This document collects and organizes studies, reports, and articles related to the impact of student-facing digital devices on achievement and learning. 
  • What Is Happening to Adolescent Educational Performance? A Collaborative Review 
    This document collects and organizes dozens of published studies documenting changes in adolescent educational performance in the USA in the 21st century, with a special emphasis on changes in higher- and lower-performing students.
  • Social Media Reforms: A Collaborative Review 
    This document collects and organizes the citations and summaries of current and proposed social media reforms, both at the policy and platform levels. This also includes beneficial apps and tools, developed to mitigate the adverse effects of social media.