Research

Find out more about our interdisciplinary research on the digital good from the Digital Good Research Fund, our management team, associate researchers, postdoctoral researchers, PhD students, and our interns and fellows. These projects will all feed into the Digital Good Index, a set of tools to evaluate whether digital technologies have good societal outcomes.

Year

Digital wellbeing and everyday digital disconnection practices in China

A laptop wrapped in a chain and padlock.

In a ‘hyperconnected’ digital landscape where almost everything potentially connects and is connected (Brubaker, 2020), digital disconnection, or intentionally imposing limits on one’s digital technology use, tends to be framed as a solution to connectivity’s negative effects (Kania Lundholm, 2021; Vanden Abeele and Mohr, 2021) and a crucial component of digital wellbeing (Vanden Abeele, 2021).

However, current discussions do not sufficiently interrogate the contested nature of digital wellbeing and its entanglement with digital disconnection, and they remain largely grounded in Western and Global North contexts. As such, there is a need for research examining how digital wellbeing is understood and negotiated through practices of digital disconnection across diverse social and cultural settings. This also raises critical questions about whose digital wellbeing is being considered, and who is involved in defining it?

This project explores people’s ‘everyday digital disconnection practices’ and their digital wellbeing in a Chinese context. In China, prevalent digital connectivity, facilitated by super-app ecosystems like WeChat (Chen, Mao and Qiu, 2018), has integrated work, leisure, social interactions, and public services, making it difficult for people to disconnect.

Connectivity blurs the boundaries between work and life, under an intensified work culture, such as the ‘996 schedule’ (working from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week), raising expectations that people are always online. Drawing on 30 diary-elicitation interviews, this project thus plots out different Chinese people’s perceptions, interpretations, and lived experiences of digital disconnection and digital wellbeing, and how they are shaped by the Chinese digital economy.

By offering an empirically grounded perspective on how individuals in a non-Western context negotiate digital dis/connection and digital wellbeing, this project also aims to enrich our understanding of how individuals conceptualise and evaluate ‘digital good’ in daily life and navigate the complexities of resilience in an increasingly connected world.

Team

Shaoying Zhang, PhD student, Department of Sociological Studies, University of Sheffield.

Professor Helen Kennedy, Professor of Digital Society, University of Sheffield.

Dr Ros Williams, Senior Lecturer in Digital Media and Society, University of Sheffield.

Digital mattering: A philosophical anthropology of mobile messaging as everyday human goodness

This research project reframed the question of what is a ‘good’ digital society to consider how goodness may start from small building blocks of everyday, mundane communication between individuals and their friends/family. These can be framed as the foundation of belonging; creating a sense of digital ‘mattering’ to others.

This is important as strong social connectedness is noted as the bedrock of communities which demonstrate resilience in the face of crises or adverse circumstances. The project will collected empirical data on mobile device messaging (as ubiquitous and ever-present in daily life) as acts of human caring, which prompted creative design responses to explore further possibilities to facilitate and scaffold ‘mattering’. Collectively these materials will provide provocations for discussion of philosophical anthropology during a series of international workshops exploring the concepts of human ‘goodness’, its significance, and its potential in the design of technologies in a digital age.

Team

Dr Effie Le Moignan, Assistant Professor in Computer and Information Sciences, Northumbria University

Dr Christian Early, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Interim Director – Ethical Reasoning in Action, James Madison University

Professor David Kirk, Professor of Human-Computer Interaction and Director of Open Lab and Centre for Digital Citizens, Newcastle University

Examining the role of mobile phones in people’s relationships with themselves and with others

This project aims to understand how mobile phone use, influences people’s relationships with themselves and with intimate romantic partners.

Whether this impact is positive or negative is not known as the current research literature is mixed. For instance, a lot of research in the cyberpsychology discipline focuses on examining the digital harm on individuals and relationships instead of the digital good – such as Kross et al., 2002 which found that mobile phone use is associated with negative wellbeing; and Wang et al., 2017 which identified less relationship satisfaction among romantic partners of mobile phone users. That said, there is also research to suggest digital technology can have a positive impact on wellbeing by reducing anxiety (Cauberghe et al., 2021), and can act as an enabler among romantic partners (Gabbiadina et al., 2020).

This project seeks to understand what factors may enhance the relationship between digital technology use and individual and relational wellbeing, and also identify potential harms.

We have collected data at three timepoints, 4 months apart (November 2024, March 2025, July 2025). At Time 1, we collected survey data from 2570 participants. At Time 2, 1932 of the same participants returned to complete the second survey. Finally, 1487 of the same participants returned at Time 3 to complete the third survey. Participants were UK based and broadly representative of the general population in age, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation and socioeconomic status.

Emerging findings from Wave 1 of the data suggest that positive digital behaviours in romantic relationships (e.g., like texting your partner something that makes them feel cared for) are additive, rather than compensatory, in the extent to which they are important in relationship quality over and above face-to-face behaviours. That is to say, sending positive texts does somewhat contribute to better relationship quality, but it is not a substitute for the same kind of positive behaviours occurring face-to-face. Further analysis will be conducted to explore this over time.

In addition to traditional survey items, we also explored the role of technology in romantic relationships through some open-ended questions included in the survey. Qualitative insights show that technology can both help romantic relationships (e.g., through helping to maintain intimacy when apart, and helping partners have difficult conversations) and hinder romantic relationships (e.g., through causing emotional disconnect, miscommunication, jealousy and uncertainty and technological distraction).

Overall, the findings from this survey are starting to provide some insights into how digital technology plays a role in people’s everyday intimate romantic relationships, both for good, for bad and for both.

Read the project’s pre-registration with the Open Science Framework.

Team

Dr Danielle Paddock

Postdoctoral Researcher, Digital Good Network; Research Associate, Centre for Behavioural Science and Applied Psychology (CeBSAP), Sheffield Hallam University

Dr Danielle Paddock is a cyberpsychologist and her research adopts a mixed methods approach. Her research interests are in adolescent development, wellbeing, and mental health in the digital age, with a particular interest in body image and social media. She is also interested in developing, delivering and evaluating educational programmes and digital interventions to tackle these topics.

Professor Abigail Millings

Resilience Challenge Lead, Digital Good Network; Professor of Applied Social Psychology, Centre for Behavioural Science and Applied Psychology (CeBSAP), Sheffield Hallam University

Abigail Millings is Professor of Applied Social Psychology at Sheffield Hallam University. Her research looks at close relationships, mental health, and technologies for well-being. Abigail is currently leading projects on applying behavioural science to support family hubs service uptake, funded by the Department for Education, and web-delivered therapy to reduce parental conflict, funded by the Youth Endowment Fund. She is co-founder of the UK Attachment Network.

As Resilience Challenge Leader for the Digital Good Network, Abigail helps lead the network and champions the resilience challenge area, ensuring resilience is represented in all network activities.

Exploring children’s attitudes towards notions of the digital good through hybrid arts practice

This project will host hybrid art workshops for children to imagine and shape a possible digital future where technology use is ethical, responsible, and inclusive

Mobile phone next to logos of different sites

Good digital identity futures

Exploring what it means for messy, fragmented, fluid humans to have ‘good’ digital identities.

Participatory and inclusive data stewardship

What does it mean to steward data in inclusive and participatory ways? What barriers do you face?

Re-imagining AI with Afrofuturist speculative design

This project explored how emerging AI technologies can be used to benefit everyone, especially marginalised communities, by addressing issues of inequality, exclusion, and justice.

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Research

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