DONDENA Seminar - Pablo Gracia

Adolescent digital access and engagement with online mobile technologies has intensified dramatically over recent years. These major digital transformations in adolescents’ lives have carried both opportunities –such as unique forms of learning and social connectedness– and risks –such as dangers of internet addiction and cyberbullying–. This presentation will address theoretically and empirically the impact of internet access and digital use on adolescent well-being outcomes, focusing particularly on heterogeneous effects across different groups of the population. I will structure my presentation in three parts. First, I will present a conceptual approach to investigate how digital divides are currently shaping adolescent well-being outcomes across demographic and socioeconomic groups. Second, I will examine the impact of internet access on adolescent outcomes. I will do so by applying a quasi-experimental sibling fixed-effects approach to Norwegian registry data to assess how the gradual expansion of broadband internet impacted students’ schooling outcomes across different population groups. Third, I will examine how digital use shapes unequal child and adolescent well-being outcomes across demographic and socioeconomic groups. This question will be mainly answered by investigating how digital maturity and parental mediation strategies explain adolescent well-being, using latent-class and structural equation modelling techniques with population-level cross-sectional and longitudinal data. The presentation will conclude with reflections around current and new directions of research in this research field. 

Pablo Gracia is Research Professor of Sociology at Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) within the Centre for Demographic Studies (CED). He received an MSc in Social Demography and PhD in Sociology from Pompeu Fabra University, combined with further PhD training at the University of Oxford. After receiving his PhD, he got postdoctoral positions at the University of Amsterdam and European University Institute, and later became Professor in Sociology at Trinity College Dublin. Prof. Gracia is the lead PI of a team studying Families and Inequalities that currently focuses on three key research areas: (1) Social and Population Inequalities in Child Development; (2) Adolescent Digital Lives and Well-Being; and (3) Gender Gaps in Time Use and Mental Health. He is currently the lead and country-level PI of projects funded by the European Research Council and Horizon Europe, with his recent work published in journals like the European Sociological Review, Journal of Marriage and Family, Information, Communication & Society, European Journal of Population, and New Media & Society.