ABOUT EUSSSI Associate Professor School of Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
“Creative responses to youths’ socioemotional health: Empirical and methodological insights on DIY cultures and social media research”
In this talk I discuss my current research, which seeks to identify the most prevalent socio-emotional and mental (SE/M) problems young people in Singapore experience and how they attribute contextual and causal meanings to those problems through content creation on social media. Young peoples’ SE/M health is an increasing concern in many parts of the world. The wake of the Covid-19 pandemic has been marked by increased perceptions of insecurity, anxiety, and isolation. These perceptions are compounded in Singapore due to the nation’s hyper-competitive environment, with Singaporean youths showing lower levels of life satisfaction and higher levels of social withdrawal, depression, and anxiety compared to many other nations. Singaporeans are often very open about their SE/M problems on social media platforms.
I frame my discussion in terms of creativity, which I divide into two dimensions. The first dimension is empirical and considers how young people use social media to challenge medicalized/pathologized definitions of themselves and/or the problems they experience. Afraid of or disenchanted by top-down institutional policies that see them as having personal troubles that need individual fixing, young people are pushing back on social media by highlighting the various social and cultural conditions that cause or exacerbate their socioemotional issues. The content they produce thus represents a creative, DIY politics of protest in a society in which any form of protest action is expressly forbidden. While not a movement, campaign or organized reform effort, social-media activities are ground-up, cooperative action that respond to dominant sociocultural processes and institutions.
Of course, the sheer volume of social media data makes a comprehensive grounded understanding difficult, if not impossible. The second dimension is therefore methodological and examines the potential of Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPTs) to assist in the qualitative analysis of social media and other large datasets. GPTs interpret, organize, and communicate information based on researchers’ prompts. Prompting itself is a symbolic and interactive process in which researchers provide both a definition of the situation and relevant identities to a GPT, thus shaping its interpretive capacity and responses. I will show how changes to prompts influence a GPTs’ interpretative actions, and the walk through the process of using ChatGPT-4o to analyze a large set of social media posts from the platform Reddit, highlighting both the benefits and challenges of the research.