Adolescents' digital lives: Introduction to the special issue

The key message of this Special issue is that a more nuanced understanding and specification of digital technology use is needed, to gain a comprehensive understanding of adolescent's lives in a digital age (Livingstone, 2024).The digital context is rapidly increasing in the lives of adolescents and across society.Whereas a few decades ago, the digital activity of adolescents was constrained to television and earlier forms of computing and instant messaging on mobile phones, today sees adolescents engaging with a much wider set of digital activities and devices.The time spent on these devices is of great interest to researchers, as is what adolescents do on their devices.This activity sets new parameters for the digital context, making it more diverse and time consuming than ever before.Furthermore, the digital context in which adolescents develop spills over into the offline world.Interactions and interests forged in the online and digital world continue in the offline world, and aspects of the digital world are talked about and influence offline interactions and activity.In this perspective, the digital context is interwoven into the offline world, and it is hard to separate the two.To begin to understand this complex new reality, we need to consider differences in adolescents' characteristics (such as their age, social background interests and social and emotional capacities), the contexts in which they use digital tools, and the digital technologies themselves that can comprise different apps, networks and different regulations of their usage.Drawing on evidence from different data sources, the studies included in this special issue examine interactions between adolescent social and emotional wellbeing when using different digital technologies, as well as the role of parents, peers and teachers in shaping these interactions and associated outcomes.The findings suggest that the use of digital technology can in some instances be beneficial and in other instances detrimental for adolescent development, depending on characteristics of the individual, the context in which they use these technologies, and the different technologies used.A number of papers focused on associations between the use of digital technologies and well-being.A 7-day diary study by Scott et al. (2024) among Australian adolescents showed differences in the use of digital technologies for emotion regulation and their effectiveness depending on adolescents' emotional wellbeing (measured by indicators of emotional problems and loneliness).The question of whether socially anxious young people perceive social media as a less risky context than face-to-face interactions to express emotions in communication with their peers was addressed in the study by Angelini et al. (2024).Based on a sample of 1046 Italian students the findings suggested a potentially beneficial role of social media for those who are more socially anxious.In particular the absence of nonverbal cues (such as tone of voice or eye contact) was associated with a higher level of satisfaction with online communication among socially anxious students, while students with lower socially anxiety were more reliant on nonverbal cues.Social interaction skills were also the topic of the study by Lamash et al. (2024) who developed an online questionnaire to measure adolescents' social interaction skills regarding both in-person and social media interactions and established their significant association with subjective wellbeing.The study by Van de Casteele et al. (2024) identified satisfaction of basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness both offline and online as significant predictors of adolescent mental health, although offline need satisfaction played a more crucial role in their samples of adolescents and in particular among emerging adults in Belgium.Another set of studies address the role of interventions to support adaptive use of digital technologies.The study by Favini et al. (2024) evaluated the effectiveness of pilot school-based interventions to tackle online addictive behaviors in a sample of 462 Italian 14-16 year olds.Results confirmed the short-term effectiveness of their intervention, in particular a significant buffering effect of self-regulatory self-efficacy beliefs, highlighting the importance to develop relevant agentic behaviors among young people to reduce online problematic behaviors.In a sample of 1018 Austrian adolescents Strohmeier et al. ( 2024) addresses the digital gender gap.Results showed that girls had lower digital career aspirations and were less likely to have access to a laptop than a smartphone, compared with boys.Interventions enhancing girls' digital self-efficacy beliefs and media appraisal are identified as potential leverage to close this digital gender gap, while parental or teacher's behavior showed no significant association with digital career aspirations.The role of parents was also the topic of the study by Bradt et al. (2024).Using data of 1651 Belgian adolescents, this study showed that the perceived degree of restrictive mediation as such was not strongly associated with problematic video gaming