Students frequently use social media (SM) as a digital break from studying. Concerns have been raised that these breaks harm academic performance and wellbeing by acting as a form of procrastination. Counter evidence suggests they can also act as a form of recovery that positively supports performance and well-being. It is currently unclear how SM can be used as a healthy rather than unhealthy break.
This project takes a research-through design approach drawing on behavioural frameworks and an emotion-regulation perspective to investigate how SM can support students in taking healthy breaks from studying. Four studies were conducted.
Study 1 used qualitative methods to investigate what characterises a healthy and unhealthy social media break from a behavioural and emotion-regulation perspective.
Study 2 was a systematic review of past emotion-regulation literature to synthesise design guidelines for developing technologies supporting healthy SM breaks and reducing unhealthy ones.
Study 3 involved co-design workshops with undergraduates in ideating and developing a chatbot prototype (BreakBOT) that implements emotion-regulation design guidelines to support taking healthy SM breaks.
Study 4 used a mixed-methods approach to explore undergraduates’ experience using BreakBOT in-the-wild.
Together this work provides a set of contributions that advance our understanding of students’ SM break-taking behaviour and how we can design systems to support them in taking healthy rather than unhealthy breaks when studying.
People
This project was conducted by Elahi Hossain under the supervision of Prof Anna Cox, Prof Nadia Berthouze and Dr Greg Wadley.
Publications
Hossain, E., Wadley, G., Berthouze, N., & Cox, A. L. (2024). Social Media Breaks: An Opportunity for Recovery and Procrastination. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction.
Hossain, E., Wadley, G., Berthouze, N., & Cox, A. (2022, April). Motivational and situational aspects of active and passive social media breaks may explain the difference between recovery and procrastination. In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Extended Abstracts (pp. 1-8).
