New preprint posted with Tiziano Gerosa and Marco Gui: https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/up9xm In adolescents' everyday lives, critical moments for social and physiological well-being include sleep, school, time with friends, meals,… -- smartphones are often constant companions. Is that "problematic"? Instead of imposing an addiction frame, the new pervasiveness scale (Smartphone Pervasiveness Scale for adolescents (SPS-A)) assesses the … Continue reading Smartphone Use and Academic Performance: A Pervasiveness Approach Beyond Addiction →

If you’re looking for a journal that supports open science in communication and media research through open access, registered reports etc., we started a list. View and comment on the latest version here or download a static PDF here. Open media and communication research has many more aspects – see, for example, this summary by … Continue reading Journals for Open Media and Communication Research →

It is misleading to use the top performing individuals to compare groups of unequal sizes. Say you wanted to know whether men or women are better at chess or which country has the best athletes; using the top performers as representatives for each group (gender or country) would bias the evaluation simply because of group … Continue reading How the Participation Gap Biases Group Evaluation →

In this video, which is part of a series of short interviews with the international partners of the From Digital Skills to Tangible Outcomes (DiSTO) project, Dr Moritz Büchi (University of Zürich) summarises his research agenda and shares some surprising insights from his study on digital inequalities and well-being. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3nNB7m7ic4

Update: Preprint posted Update: Video Abstract https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-GwpXr5Vio How can we live a good life both thanks to and despite the constant use of digital ICTs? A theoretical framework, Digital Well-Being Theory, is outlined that focuses on the mechanisms between digital ICT use and well-being by analyzing concomitant harms and benefits associated with individual’s digital behaviors, … Continue reading Towards Theories of Digital Well-Being →

My contribution to this paper on predicting life outcomes was a model that predicted the "material hardship" variable and performed better than the baseline model even though, and this was the point, the selected predictor variables made absolutely no theoretical sense, i.e., they had no plausible causal connection to the outcome, they just happened to … Continue reading “Predicting” Crime with Opaque Automated Systems →

[pdf] Andrea Ruggeri's Rules of Thumb for publishing journal articles is probably a productive practical guide, particularly for PhD students. Some of the most vital information that many early stage PhD students may not know or get to know in formal training are that most papers get rejected, most published papers looked very different upon … Continue reading Publishing Journal Articles →

Digital overuse and subjective well-being in a digitized society For most people in Switzerland, effective Internet use is essential for everyday life. But the constant abundance of digital communication and information options can also be difficult to manage. Not valid in all dimensions, but imo still a useful analogy: ICTs are like food. The question … Continue reading Publications on Digital Overuse and on the Chilling Effects of Algorithmic Profiling →

Four new research reports on Internet use and related topics in Switzerland based on a representative sample including non-users have been published. Next to some basic figures on Internet use in Switzerland in 2019, we also explored issues such as privacy and chilling effects, users' counter practices, social digital pressure, perceived risks, and e-voting. This … Continue reading Research Reports from the World Internet Project – Switzerland 2019 Published →

This is an adapted and translated presentation given following the Scientifica Warm-Up screening of Brazil (1985), 23 August 2019, KOSMOS, Zurich, Switzerland In the following, I would like to present two aspects of today’s digital surveillance situation and a consequence of this with a link to current research. The first aspect is “blind” trust in … Continue reading The Chilling Effects of Digital Surveillance →