Social media steals time that could be used doing something else, and there’s evidence that using social media causes harm to young people’s mental health. Assistant professor of marketing Dr Romain Cadario from Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University (RSM) has been awarded a €50,000 grant from the Dutch Research Council (NWO) to develop an intervention that encourages people to put down social media apps and do something else with their time. He will be the principal investigator on the project called Substituting TikTok with cooking? Developing and testing a time substitution intervention to reduce problematic social media use. The grant will be used to fund a field experiment run in partnership with a popular smartphone app for optimising screen time, StayFree.
Romain Cadario won the grant through the NWO’s board for Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) Open Competition, and it will fund his work for 12 months. His research proposal explained how increasing numbers of smartphone apps allow users to set daily time limits on their social media activities, but not many consumers adopt them. And even fewer people use them for an extended period of time. His plan is to develop an intervention that inspires people to set a daily limit for using social media, and stick to it.
“People commit to reducing their time on social media by setting daily limits on the app, and can customise it for each social media app that they want to limit. The key feature is that it also suggests something else you can do with your time once your reach your limits – such as cooking.”
Dr Romain Cadario was one of three researchers from Erasmus University Rotterdam to be awarded grants in this latest round from the NWO. The others were Dr Yao Chen from the Erasmus School of Economics for Public Funds, Private Gains: The influence of government spending on euro area regional productivity, and Dr Cornelia van Diepen from the Erasmus School of Health Policy and Management for The importance of person-centred care for BRCA-diagnosed women.
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Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University (RSM) is one of Europe’s top-ranked business schools. RSM provides ground-breaking research and education furthering excellence in all aspects of management and is based in the international port city of Rotterdam – a vital nexus of business, logistics and trade. RSM’s primary focus is on developing business leaders with international careers who can become a force for positive change by carrying their innovative mindset into a sustainable future. Our first-class range of bachelor, master, MBA, PhD and executive programmes encourage them to become critical, creative, caring and collaborative thinkers and doers. www.rsm.nl
For more information about RSM or this release, please contact Erika Harriford-McLaren, communications manager for RSM, on +31 10 408 2877 or by email at harriford@rsm.nl.
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