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Summary
Our goal is to conduct a large online questionnaire study on the relationship between mental health, epistemic trust, sexting and social media use among young people. Epistemic trust means a person’s ability to trust appropriately in cultural sources of new knowledge. So it is defined as openness to the reception of information from others, while disruption can take the form of excessive mistrust or excessive credulity- which is the tendency to be too ready to believe that something is real or true- or a combination of both, which is linked to the development of socio-emotional problems. We would also like to look at how these relationships are linked to trauma, reflective functioning, attachment, and socioeconomic status, factors that have already been found to be relevant in existing research on epistemic trust and mental health.
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Background
There has been some research on the relationship between disruptions in the capacity for epistemic trust and the development of socio-emotional problems. There is also currently increasingly societal and clinical concern about the relationship between problematic social media use and socio-emotional problems (Coyne et al., 2020; Kelly et al., 2018; O’Reilly, 2020). However, there is to our knowledge little existing research that has considered how epistemic disruption might be associated with increased vulnerability to problematic social media exposure and expressions of sexuality online. Therefore, our goal is to conduct a large online questionnaire study to gain a deeper insight into the possible interplay between these factors. In addition, we will also be conducting qualitative interviews and focus groups to get a better sense of what young people think about these issues.
- Methods
Participants will be recruited in a variety of ways, through online advertising of the study and through the dissemination of posters, and through our professional network. All participants will be required to complete an informed consent form before the study begins, and all information will be pseudonymised.
The first study will test the reliability and validity of the Adolescent version of the Epistemic Trust, Mistrust and Credulity Questionnaire (ETMCQ). The second study will use self-report questionnaires to investigate the possible relationship between ET and adverse childhood experiences, attachment styles and mentalizing abilities. The third study will involve conducting a focus group, and the fourth study will involve one to one qualitative interviews.
The first two studies will take place online using quantitative questionnaires. Participants are eligible to participate if they are aged between 16 and 24 years old, are currently living in the UK, and are proficient in written and spoken English.
After reading the information sheet, participants will be asked to decide and sign a consent form. The study will last approximately 40 minutes. Participation is completely voluntary and they can withdraw at any point without giving a reason and without it affecting them in any way.
The questionnaires have been selected for their credibility and popularity in surveys. Many are the ‘gold-standard’ measures of the field and take 5-10 minutes to complete.
- Impact
There is currently a lot of concern in the media about how young people currently have problems with their mental health, whether that is feelings of sadness, anxiety, anger, or substance abuse. We also know there is a lot of concern about how social media use affects young people. The aim of this research is to find out more about these issues from young people themselves.
For example, many young people might find the friendships and information they get online helpful and supportive. Other young people might find they experience problems of bullying, or that seeing others online makes them feel more lonely. We would like to get a more complete picture of how you find social media affects you, and whether it impacts your mental health for better or worse. We are also interested in the question of trust for young people. As we enter our teenage years, we need to make more and more decisions about how to trust and believe – we move on from listening mostly to our parents or carers, and other people become more important: friends, peers, boyfriend/girlfriends, teachers, or adults in our community. We also need to decide how and what to trust when we see things online. We know that some people who have had difficult life experiences, especially when they are children, find it harder to trust people. This is a very understandable feeling for those who have sometimes found that the people around them have let them down. But feeling like you can’t trust other people can also make things harder. It can make it feel difficult to know when it is a good idea to get help from people, and it may be hard to take in what other people think or say, especially when it comes to things that are really serious or important.
We are interested in finding out whether problems with trust, mental health and social media use are connected for some young people.
- Research Team and Contact Details
UK study
- Thomas Booker (Research associate, UCL), Thomas.booker@ucl.ac.uk
- Dr Chloe Campbell (Deputy Director of Psychoanalysis Unit, UCL), c.campbell@ucl.ac.uk
Belgian study (‘Hoe is het om jong te zijn?’)
- Chrissy Engelen (Clinical Psychologist, KU Leuven)
- Dr Patrick Luyten (Professor of Clinical Psychology, KU Leuven)
- Useful Links
- Follow us on Instagram
- Epistemic Trust conference in March 2025
- Epistemic Trust Research at the Psychoanalysis Unit, UCL
- Campbell, C., Tanzer, M., Saunders, R., Booker, T., Allison, E., Li, E., O’Dowda, C., Luyten, P. and Fonagy, P., 2021. Development and validation of a self-report measure of epistemic trust. PloS one, 16(4), p.e0250264 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0250264
