The global pandemic has been fueling both psychological distress and the use of social media, by adolescents. However, we don't know how adolescents with mental health issues perceive and respond to mental health-related vlogs and popular YouTubers as sources of support. Our goal is to investigate how mental health topics are embedded and emerged in popular YouTubers' vlogs, how adolescents with mental health issues respond to, interpret, evaluate, and (co)-produce these multimodal messages and how this vulnerable group experiences YouTubers' roles as influencers and potential peer support. We deploy both multimodal qualitative and co-research designs, and novel statistical machine-learning-based data analysis methodologies. Thus, we contribute to social media research methodology by developing new and context-sensitive multi-disciplinary methods as well as theoretical concepts and understanding on adolescent mental health literacy and peer support in a YouTube environment.

2022

2026