The CSBS is pleased to announce that four small grants were awarded during the Fall 2024 Small Grant Program Cycle. The Small Grant Program brings together researchers to develop ambitious and innovative research projects that will advance social and behavioral science and show promise for external funding. Read more about the recipients below!
Title: Argumentative writing with Generative AI to learn from texts: Balancing the benefits and costs of practice vs. effort reduction for post-secondary students
PI: Jennifer Cromley, professor of educational psychology
Summary: Generative AI (GenAI) offers individuals the opportunity to offload writing and argumentation tasks, potentially increasing time management. However, the implications of this offloading are not well understood, as it could deprive individuals of valuable practice in writing, reasoning, and critical thinking. The research team will conduct an experiment examining individuals’ use of either GenAI or a manual writing process to complete an argumentative essay based on opposing science-related texts.
Title: Hurries, Waits, and Worries: Understanding Developmental Anxiety in Emerging Adulthood
PI: Kaylin Ratner, assistant professor of educational psychology | Co-Is: Chris Napolitano; Mary Kate Koch (Gonzaga University)
Summary: With rates of psychological distress at an all-time high in young adults, identifying the unique developmental challenges they face can promote healthier transitions to independence. This project will create a scale for developmental anxiety, a novel construct that the team previously coined to capture a young person’s worry about meeting adult milestones on time, if ever. Developmental anxiety is thought to be caused by ecological and psychosocial pressures that both “hurry” young people to grow up quickly but also “wait” to assume adult roles. The research team will begin their project by qualitatively capturing participants’ lived experiences with hurries, waits, and developmental anxiety, and will develop a quantitative scale to index developmental anxiety and better understand its associations with mental health, adult development, and other existing constructs.
Title: Digital Empowerment for Youth: Experimental Evidence from India
PI: Lena Song, assistant professor of economics
Summary: Concerns about the impacts of smartphones and social media have risen alongside their surging use in developing countries. One potential solution is educational interventions that encourage users to optimize their interactions with digital technologies. The research team co-created a multi-week, evidence-based digital empowerment curriculum designed to expand students’ ability to exert deliberate control over their use of social media and smartphones. They will implement this curriculum with college students in India as a classroom-based course and as a text message-based course. Using a randomized controlled trial, they will evaluate both versions of the curriculum and estimate the effects of exposure to the curriculum on social media consumption, mental health, misinformation discernment, sleep and concentration, and academic outcomes.
Title: A Multi-Method Approach for Predicting and Understanding Transgender Suicidal Ideation and Behavior
PI: Chadly Stern, assistant professor of psychology | Co-Is: Ben Hankin; Lu Cheng, University of Illinois Chicago
Summary: Transgender individuals frequently face stigma, contributing to high rates of self-harm that researchers characterize as a public health crisis. This study aims to develop models to predict suicidal thoughts and behaviors among transgender people and understand what makes those models accurate. The team will examine the role of policy affecting transgender individuals and the impact of hate speech on social media. By using advanced machine learning techniques, the researchers aim to identify the factors that most contribute to self-harm risk, helping improve early detection and intervention for transgender individuals.