Researchers from the University of Cambridge and the Bradford Centre for Health Data Science will track thousands of schoolchildren to uncover whether restricting social media can improve the mental health of teenagers.

The IRL (In Real Life) Trial will be jointly run by Prof Amy Orben from Cambridge’s MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, and Dr Dan Lewer from the Bradford Centre for Health Data Science. It will monitor around 4,000 students aged between 12 and 15 in Bradford.

Each student will be given a time limit on social media, and these apps will be completely restricted between 9pm and 7am. The name of the trial comes from the researchers’ discussions with teenagers, who reported that social media was a distraction from ‘real life’ connections and activities.

Researchers will compare the mental wellbeing of this group with that of other Bradford students who use social media normally.

The social media restrictions and curfew will be randomly allocated to half of each year group, and their results will be compared to the remaining students with no limits on social media use. 

Data from interviews and questionnaires alongside data obtained from social media and phone browser apps will be used to assess changes in various categories, including anxiety, sleep quality, body image, social comparison, and school attendance.

During the six-week study, a special app will be installed onto the participants’ devices to control popular apps such as TikTok and Snapchat, while excluding those needed for communication like WhatsApp. Currently, the study plans to limit social media screen time to one hour per day, although this may change.

Orben, the programme leader at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, said: “There is a range of evidence that social media is harming individual children and adolescents, including very severe harms, and that is irrefutable, and it’s leading to a lot of debate and questions around how we deal with making the online world safer for young people and also to encourage their healthy development and activities that will lead to both good mental health, but also good functioning in society.”

She added: “To our knowledge, there has been no large-scale experimental study reducing or removing time spent on social media and healthy under 18-year-olds around the world and so this study is a world first to try to look at that question.”

Orben leads a research team at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit called the Digital Mental Health Group. Last year, the team led a report commissioned by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, reviewing previous research that explored the effects of social media and phones on young people’s mental health.

The study, which is being funded by the Wellcome Trust, is expected to last two years, with researchers aiming to have completed their data analysis by the summer of next year.