Adolescents increasingly navigate complex emotional and social challenges within digital environments such as social media, messaging apps, and gaming platforms. While these spaces are central to identity development and peer relationships, they also introduce risks when emotional responses become dysregulated. Impulsive posting, withdrawal, or online conflict can spill into classrooms, shaping peer dynamics, learning, and wellbeing.


This project introduces the construct of digital regulation: young people's capacity to recognise, manage, and adapt their emotional and behavioural responses across digital contexts. Although emotion regulation is well-theorised, little research has examined how these skills are enacted online, particularly during developmental transitions such as moving from primary to secondary school or junior to senior secondary. These periods intensify peer influence, digital engagement, and the need for adaptive skills.


Using a mixed-methods design, this study investigates how students, educators, and parents conceptualise digital regulation and the supports needed to foster it. Data collection includes: student focus groups (Years 6-7, 10-11) exploring lived experiences of online emotional responses; student surveys examining associations between digital behaviours, engagement, and offline functioning; and educator and parent interviews exploring contextual influences across school and home.


Analysis will combine reflexive thematic analysis with descriptive and correlational statistics to provide both depth and breadth. By the time of the conference, baseline findings will illustrate how adolescents and key adults understand digital regulation and how ecological factors shape its development.


This project also establishes groundwork for co-design workshops with students to generate ideas for future supports. These workshops will inform development of evidence-based supports that can be integrated into digital platforms to assist adolescents' regulation in real time. By situating digital regulation within theories of emotion regulation, self-determination, and ecological systems, this research contributes to international debates on adolescent digital wellbeing and highlights approaches that empower young people to thrive across online and offline worlds.