Stephen Schueller
stephenschueller.bsky.social
Stephen Schueller
@stephenschueller.bsky.social
Professor of Psychology and Informatics, University of California, Irvine.

Clinical psychologist, mental health services researcher, implementation scientist, Lakers fan and Swiftie.

Follow me for my views on digital mental health!
You can see Tim's presentation here: osf.io/zvp8k/files/...
OSF
osf.io
October 25, 2025 at 8:51 PM
Emphasizing in the presentation that this is a pilot! With some limitations of being a pilot - only open to a few specific areas of research, researcher's must meet eligibility, 6-month maximum timeframe for data collection, and certain Instagram data can be requested
October 25, 2025 at 8:38 PM
Getting the IRB for this study was hard - 11 months and 8 rounds of revisions raising issues such as the necessity of collecting such data, consent/assent procedures, potential of explicit images from children's smartphones, and safety protocols if content is concerning
October 25, 2025 at 7:42 PM
@xiaoransun.bsky.social is the PI of the Adolescent and Family Screenomics Study, a study of 163 adolescents and 107 parents who contributed 6 months of screenomic data (screenshots every 5 seconds). It resulted in ~50 million screenshots with ~38 million screenshots coming from adolescents
October 25, 2025 at 7:37 PM
@xiaoransun.bsky.social is a real expert in this space and has done work looking at comparisons between self-report and objectively collected data, demonstrating the benefits of considering data donation paradigms: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Agreement between self-reported and objectively measured smartphone use among adolescents and adults
Almost everything we think we know about the prevalence, correlates, risks, and benefits of smartphone use is based on individuals’ self-reported esti…
www.sciencedirect.com
October 25, 2025 at 7:35 PM
Super interesting work by Merve Cerit on using LLMs to understand digital life of individuals through multi-dimensional data: dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1...
Media Content Atlas: A Pipeline to Explore and Investigate Multidimensional Media Space using Multimodal LLMs | Proceedings of the Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computin...
dl.acm.org
October 25, 2025 at 6:55 PM
More info about the Screenomic project here: stanfordscreenomics.github.io
Stanford Screenomics
stanfordscreenomics.github.io
October 25, 2025 at 6:44 PM
Nilam Ram talks about the human screenome project, collecting smartphone screenshots every 5 seconds. They've collected around 4 centuries of data at this point 😮
October 25, 2025 at 6:40 PM
Nilam Ram notes different ways to think about digital trace data - APIs, data donation, and tracking. Highlighted in this paper:

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
Digital Trace Data Collection for Social Media Effects Research: APIs, Data Donation, and (Screen) Tracking
In social media effects research, the role of specific social media content is understudied, in part attributable to the fact that communication science previously lacked methods to access social m...
www.tandfonline.com
October 25, 2025 at 6:34 PM
One aspect of participant's needs are educating them about how this data might be used
October 25, 2025 at 5:45 PM
Love how @munmun10.bsky.social emphasizes that the CANDOR platform has different user types - study coordinators and participants
October 25, 2025 at 5:44 PM
They also have used a browser-based user agent to pull videos and other multimedia content from public social media spaces to link with user data
October 25, 2025 at 5:34 PM
Their team saves data as Parquet files which is a post-processed output format that can be easily read and scanned across participants. Can improve deserialization times and are modular and easy to share compared to a database
October 25, 2025 at 5:32 PM
You can learn more about @munmun10.bsky.social 's CANDOR platform here: vorcha.cc.gatech.edu
Data Contribution Portal
vorcha.cc.gatech.edu
October 25, 2025 at 5:28 PM
@munmun10.bsky.social notes the challenges of understanding relationships we're interested in due to the skew of research towards publicly accessible data which limits the ecologically validity of data
October 25, 2025 at 5:16 PM
Dr. Christina Haag talks about the logistical challenges of doing data donation analysis

Emphasizing that the difficulty in analyzing this data is often not a technical challenge, but a conceptual challenge
October 25, 2025 at 4:35 PM
Valerie Yap shares insights around ethical concerns with doing data donation work with young people.

They have a comprehensive consent process that includes a plain language information sheet, video demonstration, Q&A opportunities

And also be prepared for a long IRB review and back and forth
October 25, 2025 at 4:33 PM
Valerie Yap discusses some ways to build trust through clear communication in data donation work with young people:

-Lead with validation, respecting adolescent's expertise on their digital life
-Frame data donation as a solution to platform gatekeeping
-Build agency and reciprocity
October 25, 2025 at 4:31 PM