Not on my watch: understanding the affordances of self-tracking for adolescents' social and psychological wellbeing

Thesis

We can see aspects of our everyday lives through data – how many steps we took to the supermarket, how many kilometres we covered walking the dog, or how many calories we burned cycling to work. Whilst self-tracking is not new, and indeed not always digital, we have seen the continuing development of digital tools that enable us to monitor, control, and analyse vast quantities of personal health data. Self-tracking tools have become increasingly relevant in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. COVID-19 has raised important questions about what it means to track data, what it means to be tracked, and how we understand the consequences of tracked data. Never has it been more apparent that our self-tracked data have social consequences.

We know that many adolescents engage in self-tracking practices. Nevertheless, existing research on adolescents’ self-tracking is limited outside of intervention-based studies. Most work has focused on adult users; however, adolescents’ self-tracking practices do not always map neatly onto those of adults. In this thesis, I describe insights from my mixed methods study involving over 600 adolescents in the United Kingdom across an online survey, online interviews, and online co-design workshops. Drawing data from these methods together, I explore the affordances of self-tracking for adolescents’ social and psychological wellbeing to better understand how we can take positive steps forward to empower adolescents’ autonomous choices around their self-tracking practices.

My empirical findings emphasise the complexity and variation in adolescents’ self-tracking practices, illuminated by the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Adolescents negotiate complex sociomaterial relations with self-tracking tools, with key tensions around practices of creativity and control. I argue that the limited attention paid to adolescent voices in self-tracking research and design is problematic and that urgent work is needed to ensure that these valuable perspectives are heard and heeded.

Authors: Freeman, JL

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-o8d5mqgen
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: exercise; teens; social relationships; adolescents; psychological wellbeing; wellbeing; health and fitness; social media; self-tracking; quantified self
• Subjects: Psychology; Health behavior in adolescence; Social media and society; Education; Internet and youth; Sociology