Young People’s Digital Lives: The Role of ...

Katie Davis is a Project Manager at Harvard Project Zero, where she investigates the role of digital media technologies in adolescents’ academic, social, and moral lives. She also serves as an Advisory Board Member for MTV's digital abuse campaign, A Thin Line. In addition to publishing and presenting her research in scholarly venues, Katie regularly shares her work with parents, teachers, and school administrators in an effort to build connections between educational research and practice.

In November 2011, Katie graduated from Harvard Graduate School of Education with a doctorate in Human Development and Education. She also holds a master’s degree from Harvard in Mind, Brain, and Education and another in Risk and Prevention. Prior to coming to Harvard in 2005, Katie taught second grade in Framingham, MA, and fourth grade in Bermuda, her native country.

ABSTRACT
The social contexts of today’s adolescents differ markedly from those of their predecessors. Digital media technologies such as cell phones and social network sites have created new social contexts and in some cases altered existing ones. These new contexts raise questions about how adolescents undertake key developmental tasks, such as the formation of close interpersonal relationships and a satisfying and meaningful identity. Katie Davis will provide insight into these questions by drawing on findings from her dissertation research, a mixed-methods study investigating adolescents’ sense of identity and the role that parents, friends, and digital media practices play in the construction of the self.

For the quantitative component of her study, Katie used structural equation modeling to analyze survey responses from 2,079 students attending grades 8-12 in public and private schools in Bermuda. The qualitative component of the study involved a thematic analysis of 32 in-depth interviews conducted with students drawn from the same population as the survey data. Both the quantitative and qualitative results suggest that, depending on the uses to which adolescents put them, digital media may either play a positive or negative role in their interpersonal and intrapersonal experiences.

By examining factors traditionally associated with investigations of adolescent development in light of the new technologies that are reshaping adolescents’ social contexts, Katie’s research contributes to the growing body of literature concerned with identifying how adolescents’ digital media practices affect their experiences of themselves and others.

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