Festival of Diversity, Scoping Review & meta-analysis and some exciting news...
We're back, and the new year brought great things for the Digital Mental Health Group!
First of all…🥳
We are delighted to start this newsletter with a huge congratulations to two members of our group! Dr Amanda Fergusson has been offered a non-stipendiary Junior Research Fellowship at Darwin College. This prestigious position is awarded to select early-stage academics who are conducting excellent research and will allow Amanda to join the college as a member of the Governing Body.
The celebrations do not end there, however, as the new year also brought great news for one of our Research Assistants, Lukas Gunschera. After an extremely successful application and interview, Lukas has been offered a PhD place within our group. Not only did Lukas secure a place, but he has also received confirmation of MRC funding for four full years. He plans to apply computational neuroscience approaches to investigate mechanisms of social media use, and relate these to behavioural or health outcomes.
We are extremely proud of both Lukas and Amanda, and look forward to seeing what these next steps in their career will bring.
Festival of Diversity🌏
After months of hard work and planning, one of our PhD students, Sakshi Ghai, organised a Festival of Diversity in Psychological Sciences joint hosted by the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit and Department of Psychology at Cambridge. Sakshi’s PhD work centres around adopting culturally diverse approaches to research (see more below), but she has also taken on increasingly important roles across the University, e.g. by leading an audit to diversify the undergraduate psychology curriculum.
The aim of the Festival of Diversity, funded by the University Diversity Fund, was to increase awareness about the importance of under-served populations in research, and to promote better understanding of the hidden barriers faced by under-represented faculty members and students.
Sakshi kicked off the day by introducing her work that considers how we can systematically measure diversity in psychological science, as published in her Nature Human Behaviour commentary . In this cartogram, Sakshi resized the world map based on the adolescent population living in each global region (using data from the UN population division, 2020). The darker blue areas represent more densely populated regions (India/China), while the lighter blue areas are less populated. Naturally, this is just one segment of the population, but it can be used as a proxy to show how the majority of the world’s population lives outside the Western contexts.
The day continued with Professor Duncan Astle exploring how rethinking diversity might be critical to understanding developmental disorder’s, and two panels on sample diversity and researcher diversity. The day ended with conversations with funders and publishers. These raised some provocative questions around the challenges of journal charges and the continued use of impact factors, but also highlighted positive steps different journals were taking by recruiting more editors and peer reviewers from underrepresented countries around the world.
The festival was incredibly engaging and thought provoking, and we all came away with valuable insight into the role and importance of diversity in psychological science. Another huge well done to Sakshi!
A new scoping review & meta-analysis📊
A recently published article in Clinical Psychological Science led by Sakshi Ghai and Luisa Fassi, with contributions from Faisal Awadh (a past research intern) and Amy Orben, addresses the pressing question of whether research on social media use & depression adequately represent global adolescent populations?
Their answer: No! Sample diversity was lacking not just between but within-regions.
They reviewed past literature published between 2018 and 2020 (34 articles) to investigate the proportion of studies recruiting samples from the Global North versus Global South and assess whether the association between social media and depression varies depending on the population being studied.
They found that more than 70% of studies looked at populations in the Global North, with little evidence of diversity within samples, but the associations between social media and depression were not identical in Global North and Global South regions. Given that the majority of the worlds adolescent population live in the Global South, the generalizability of current research on social media and depression can be called into question. This article highlights that in order to fully understand the relationship between social media and mental health outcomes, action must be taken to improve diversity within research samples.
The full article can be found here with open access: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/21677026221114859
We would like to thank you all for reading, and cannot wait to keep sharing our updates in this monthly newsletter📰
This newsletter was written by Amelia Leyland-Craggs (Research Assistant) and Sakshi Ghai (PhD Student).