A team from seven institutions will use health and education data - including mental health data and NAPLAN results – to explore the relationships between young people and their screen time.

The Black Dog Institute’s Associate Professor, Dr Aliza Werner-Seidler, will lead the team in a project that will also involve the University of New South Wales, the Australian Catholic University, the University of Queensland and Flinders University.

It has been funded through the NSW Government’s Screen Use and Addiction Research Fund.

Dr Werner-Seidler said the project would allow us to better understand if and when high school students’ recreational screen use became problematic, who was most at risk and why.

“We have been measuring the screen use of a group of 5,500 Australian adolescents since 2020, along with factors such as depression, anxiety, stress, physical activity, sleep, peer factors, bullying and sense of belonging,” Dr Werner-Seidler said.

“Now, this project will help us to understand how these variables relate to each other.

“For the first time we can link the experience of this cohort to mental health data and educational records, including NAPLAN results.”

The fund will support nine projects and research teams are expected to deliver their findings at the end of 2026.

The combined research effort will be administered and supported by the NSW Department of Education’s Centre for Education Statistics and Evaluation (CESE).

Dr Werner-Seidler said it was important to examine the issue carefully.

“We do not have enough science about the potential harms and benefits of recreational screen use for high school students,” she said.

“Is excessive screen use leading to poor mental health? Is poor mental health contributing to excessive screen use? Or are there bidirectional links between screen time and mental health?

“This work will help us understand whether screen time is displacing other aspects of their lives. For example, are young people less physically active? Interacting with friends in different ways? Sleeping less?

“We know what young people do on screens is nuanced; face time with a grandparent living overseas is different to visiting a dark place on the internet.

“We want to pick apart the helpful and beneficial aspects, versus the harmful. This project will help us do that.”