Struggling with screen time: Long-term trends and influences on young people's everyday lives
Kort beskrivning
The rapid rise in screen time among children and adolescents is at the heart of public debate and political concern, often portrayed as a driving force behind a range of societal challenges. At the same time, screen time has become increasingly difficult to define and study – its boundaries are blurred, its content complex, and its impact contested. As digitalization reshapes everyday life, the need for robust, long-term, and nuanced knowledge about its implications for young people has never been more urgent. This project will address this knowledge gap directly.
We pursue two aims:
- To develop and apply an innovative method for capturing the complexity, context and lived experience of current screen time.
- To uncover long-term trends in how digital media reshape young people’s use of time and space, activities, social relations, and life priorities – and shape current practices and pressures.
By adding a new wave of data (2026/27) to previous studies (2000, 2005, 2016), we trace digital practices across 25-years—from the pre-smartphone era to today’s AI-integrated smartphone-native generation.
The project is based on meso-scale, time-geographic diary and interview data collected from high school students in Gothenburg. It is carried out by a team with 25 years of experience analyzing everyday life through the lens of time use and digital transformation. The results will inform debate, support policy, and offer new insights into the societal consequences of digitalization.