Cultivating Digital Agency: Purposeful and Goal-Oriented Digital Technology Use among Children and Adolescents for Better Mental Well-Being

Grant Call: 2025 Social Science and Humanities Research Fellowship Call 

Project Status: Ongoing

The project seeks to understand how digital agency – defined as one's capacity for intentional, goal-directed interaction with digital media technologies – can be cultivated among children and adolescents in Singapore through education and changes to the environment. 

Asst Prof Tan hopes to achieve the following objectives through his project: 

• Identify and understand what digital agency means through the lived experiences of children, adolescents, and parents in Singapore, and the individual and environmental factors that enhance or undermine it. 

• Develop a method of measuring digital agency among different age groups, and examine whether it is associated with mental well-being outcomes.

• Evaluate and assess the feasibility effectiveness of a co-designed intervention in cultivating digital agency among children and adolescents in Singapore.

• Develop a set of evidence-based policy recommendations to guide national initiatives surrounding children and adolescents' use of everyday digital technology. 

Findings from the project will contribute to a policy framework to guide whole-of-government policies on digital technology use, offering a way to coordinate efforts across multiple levels from parental guidelines to technology regulations and national campaigns. It ultimately hopes to shift research and discourse from a deficit-focused perspective of children’s media use toward capacity-building and empowerment for children and adolescents to flourish in the digital age.