Research

“The Digital Determinants of Health Hub examines how digital environments shape young people’s health, wellbeing and equity, recognising that digital technologies can present both risks and opportunities”

Our Research Focus

Digital environments, exposure, risk and harm, including harmful content, online behaviours and emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence.
Platform, algorithmic and commercial systems, examining how platform design, recommender systems, artificial intelligence and commercial incentives shape digital experiences.
Inequalities, vulnerability and resilience, examining who is most exposed, who is protected, and why.
Designing, implementing and evaluating healthier digital environments, including understanding how regulation, policy and interventions can support wellbeing, connection and inclusion.
Digital policy and evaluation, generating evidence to understand whether interventions, regulations and platform changes achieve their intended public health outcomes.

This focus enables the Hub to move beyond risk-only narratives and contribute evidence on how digital environments can be shaped to better support young people’s health.

Our Methods

The Hub takes a deliberately interdisciplinary approach, integrating public health, epidemiology, systems science, psychology, behavioural science, data science and computer science to address complex questions that cannot be answered by any single discipline alone.

We use state-of-the-art methods designed to strengthen causal inference and real-world relevance, including:

Causal epidemiology and target trial emulation to move beyond association towards causal understanding.
Longitudinal and population-based data analysis to capture developmental change and inequality over time.
Digital trace data and data donation approaches, developed with strong ethical and participatory foundations.
Artificial intelligence and computational methods for analysing large-scale, multimodal digital content.

Methodological transparency, ethical rigour, and appropriateness to context guide all analytic decisions. Methods are selected based on the research question rather than technological novelty alone.

We also contribute to methodological development in areas including evidence synthesis, causal inference, evaluation, measurement, bias and the appropriate use of emerging digital data and artificial intelligence in population health research.

Research Translation

Generating evidence is only the first step. The Digital Determinants of Health Hub is committed to ensuring research informs real-world decision-making and contributes to healthier digital environments.

We work closely with policymakers, practitioners, educators, young people and partner organisations to translate research into accessible, evidence-informed resources that support policy, practice and public understanding.

Our research translation activities include:

Policy briefs to support evidence-informed policymaking and regulation.
Practice resources for educators, healthcare professionals, youth workers and third-sector organisations.
Plain language summaries and accessible explainers to make research findings available to wider audiences.
Professional education and training, including short courses and workshops on the Digital Determinants of Health.
Public engagement, including webinars, media contributions, podcasts and public events.
Youth partnership, ensuring young people's perspectives help shape how evidence is communicated and applied.

By combining rigorous research with meaningful knowledge mobilisation, we aim to ensure evidence is not only generated, but used to improve policy, practice and population health.

Current Projects

Measuring Digital Environments

Developing robust approaches to characterise and measure digital environments, including algorithmic content delivery, platform features, digital trace data, data donation and methods for synthesising evidence across diverse measures of digital exposure.
Advancing Best-Practice AI Methods for Content Annotation

Designing and evaluating ethical, transparent AI-enabled approaches to annotating digital content, using hybrid human-AI pipelines and governance frameworks suitable for sensitive youth data.
Linking Digital Exposure to Offline Health Outcomes

Examining how exposure to digital content and platform features relates to wellbeing and health-risk behaviours, using longitudinal data and causal methods.
Advancing Causal Methods for Digital Health Research

Contributing methodological research on causal inference, measurement and bias in digital health studies, including the use of target-trial emulation and mixed-data designs.
Developing Ethical Data Donation Approaches for Studying Digital Environments

Exploring the feasibility of API-based and alternative data donation approaches for researching young people’s digital environments, with attention to ethical design, transparency and trust.
National Digital Determinants of Health Study

Our flagship longitudinal research programme examining how digital environments shape children's and young people's health, wellbeing and health inequalities through innovative epidemiological methods, digital data donation and population health research.
Critical Periods of Social Media Use

Identifying critical and sensitive periods across childhood and adolescence where social media use may have the greatest influence on health, wellbeing and development, helping inform age-appropriate prevention, policy and practice.
Understanding Online Harms

Developing conceptual frameworks to define and understand online harms, examining how harms emerge within complex digital systems and informing evidence-based approaches to prevention, regulation and healthier digital environments.
Digital, Commercial & Social Determinants of Health

Advancing conceptual frameworks to understand how digital determinants of health interact with wider commercial, social and political determinants of health – including platform governance, regulation, artificial intelligence and commercial incentives – to shape digital environments, population health and health inequalities.
Evaluating Digital Policies & Interventions

Developing systems-informed approaches to evaluate digital policies and interventions, recognising that digital policies operate within complex social, commercial and technological systems and require evaluation beyond individual outcomes alone.