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 exposure, risk and harm, including exposure to harmful content and behaviours.
Algorithmic and platform systems, and how design features and recommendation processes shape young people’s online experiences.
Inequalities, vulnerability and resilience, examining who is most exposed, who is protected, and why.
Designing and evaluating positive digital environments, including conditions under which digital spaces can support wellbeing, connection and inclusion.

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, 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.
Computational and AI-enabled 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 this area, including work on bias, measurement, and the appropriate use of emerging digital data in population health research.

Current Projects

Measuring Exposure to Harmful Digital Content

Developing robust approaches to measuring young people’s exposure to alcohol, drug and antisocial content on social media platforms, with attention to algorithmic delivery, frequency, and context of 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.