GENSCOPE: GEnder Narratives and adolescents’ Socialization across COntexts, Platforms, and Engagements
This project is funded by the European Research Council (ERC) through a prestigious ERC Starting Grant. GENSCOPE seeks to fundamentally transform our understanding of how media shape adolescents’ gender beliefs, body image, sexuality, and mental health. GENSCOPE recognizes that adolescents simultaneously navigate diverse, and often conflicting, gender narratives across social media, television, and video games. The project will combine innovative quantitative (e.g., longitudinal research, daily diary research, and data donation with automated coding) and qualitative approaches (e.g., focus group interviews) to explore adolescents’ real-time interactions with gender narratives in their digital world. The project will be conducted simultaneously in Belgium, Italy, and Czechia, allowing the comparison of countries with different levels of gender equality indices.
More information about the project can be found here.
VIPPSTAR: Visually Impaired children and adolescents: bridging the gap with Personalized Prevention Strategies, Tools, Approaches, and Resources
The objective of VIPPSTAR is the set-up of a personalized prevention and intervention digital platform to assist children with visual impairment in their development. The project is coordinated the University Degli Studi Di Brescia, and more than 15 European partner universities are involved. As part of the Belgian consortium, together with UZ Leuven and the Psychology and Development in Context Department, we are currently exploring social media use of youth with visual impairment, and how this relates to their body image and identity development. A multi-method approach will be used. With qualitative interviews, we will explore experiences of youth with visual impairment with social media. With a 2-week daily diary study, we will assess daily relations between social media use and body image states among youth with visual impairment. With a randomized controlled trial, the effectiveness of an online intervention program will be tested.
The project is funded by Horizon Europe. PhD student Esmée Mooren is currently working on the project. I am her co-promotor, together with Prof. Schreurs, Prof. Luyckx, and Prof. Ortibus (all KU Leuven). https://vippstar.eu/
Sexuality, Technology, and Relationships in the Virtual Era (STRIVE)
I joined this project as postdoctoral researcher of Prof. Maheux’ SEA Lab at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Prof. Kotiuga (Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières) is co-PI. The purpose of the STRIVE study is to understand how young adults’ sexual and relational experiences are related to their well-being and health. Data Collection with young adult participants in the USA between ages 18-21 was conducted in Spring 2024.
Putting Porn Use Into Perspective: Investigating the Potential Positive Role of Pornography in Youth’s Sexuality development
Research has primarily applied a harm-focused perspective to examine the effects of adolescents’ pornography use. To overcome this negativity bias in the field, recent voices in sexology and communication literature have called for the exploration of pornography’s positive potential in youth’s sexual socialization. As a response to these calls, this project theorizes the Adolescents, Pornography, and Positive Sexuality (APPS) Model that integrates sexual media effects theories with positive media psychology and sexology literature. The APPS model will be tested using the most robust methods. New concepts will be conceptualized and operationalized by combing cognitive interviews with quantitative research (i.e., cross-sectional survey and content analysis). Further, the fluctuating impact of pornography uses on adolescents’ positive sexuality will be studied in a five-day diary study.
The project received funding from FWO. I serve as a co-promotor of a PhD student Thi Willems, together with Prof. Vandenbosch and Prof. Eggermont (KU Leuven).
Body Image and Youth with Visible Differences: Exploring the Role of Social Media
Most academics agree that social media use has small, yet consistent effects, in the development of negative, but also positive, body image components of young people without visible differences. Yet, these studies have neglected the substantial group of young individuals that have visible differences Visible differences refer to having a scar, mark, injury, or medical condition that results in a socially undesirable impact on a person’s physical appearance (e.g., psoriasis, cleft lip, or burns). This project will explore social media’s role in these young people’s body image development. The Social Media Model on Young Individuals with Visible Differences (SMM-YIVD) will be theorized and empirically validated by using multi-method research (i.e., quantitative content analysis, go-along interviews, daily diary study, experiment). This project will provide better understandings of social media effects among a group of social media users who are especially challenged to develop a healthy body image.
The project received funding from internal funding KU Leuven. I serve as a co-promotor of a PhD student Laure Dedecker, together with Prof. Vandenbosch and Prof. Schreurs (KU Leuven).
