Enhancing students’ digital wellbeing through an introductory cyberpsychology module

Background and proposed aims
Digital Psychology is a core introductory level module for all BSc (Hons) Applied Psychology students at Glasgow Caledonian University. It focuses on understanding the effects of technology use on our identities, relationships, behaviour, and wellbeing. However, digital wellbeing (DW) is not a well-defined term. No scale currently exists to specifically measure DW (Ong et al., 2021). Blog content and module feedback points to how impactful the module content is on students’ subjective digital wellbeing (SDW). The aim of this work is to develop a scale that can assess the impact of the Digital Psychology module intervention on DW. The findings can be used to inform construction of a DW measure to support rollout of a planned DW Toolkit microcredential course.

Proposed methods
Blog posts will be analysed using a Qualitative Content Analysis approach (Mayring, 2000). Focus groups will further clarify the concept of SDW and how it is distinct from general subjective wellbeing. In academic session 2022/2023, 100 Digital Psychology students will complete existing subjective wellbeing measures pre- and post-module content and activities. These findings will then be used to construct a DW measure to assess pre- and post-module DW.

Potential implications and applications
This work will develop a DW measure to support rollout of a new DW microcredential to students across disciplines, as well as professionals working with young people in a variety of roles (such as educators), and parents who wish to examine and understand their own and others’ digital behaviour through a psychological lens.