“Students are actually the heart of my lab, and thank goodness, because the subject of my lab is adolescent social media,” says Linda Charmaraman, senior research scientist at the Wellesley Centers for Women, “so I need people closer in age to tell me what trends are happening.”
As part of her research on the benefits and challenges of social media on the mental health of young people, Charmaraman hires student researchers who study the role of social media in adolescent development through the Youth, Media & Wellbeing (YMW) Research Lab. They provide resources and strategies in navigating online spaces by hosting free, virtual and in-person workshops over the summer for middle school girls and nonbinary youth. These workshops began in 2019 after the lab was funded by a National Institute of Health (NIH) grant awarded to undergraduate institutions to foster social science experiences for students; it was the College’s first NIH social sciences grant of its kind. The grant has ended, but Charmaraman continues this vital research-and-action along with student facilitators. In 2025, the lab and workshops were funded by the Metrowest Women's Fund, Metrowest Health Foundation, Morningstar Family Foundation, an anonymous Wellesley alumna donor, and Wellesley’s Summer Science Social Research Project (SSSRP) program.
Margaret Isacson ’26, an East Asian studies major and art history minor, worked in the YMW lab during the last two spring semesters. “My experience led me to work with the lab full-time over the summer as an SSSRP intern with the College,” Isacson says. This position included workshop planning and also allowed for research opportunities conducted by the lab team.
Isacson, alongside fellow SSSRP intern Syenna Williams ’27, a women’s and gender studies major, co-organized these workshops along with a team of over 15 Wellesley students. Williams interned at the YMW lab during her sophomore year and this past summer. “I loved the lab so much and being able to interact directly with the community my research was focused on,” she says. She says the experience taught her the importance of having a partner in a research setting: “Cooperation is so important in every aspect of life, and being able to have co-interns to share the load of work and the overall experience with was so valuable to me.”
As workshop facilitators, Williams and Isacson collaborated in lesson planning and leading activities related to self-esteem. Charmaraman chose the topic because it is always among the top three answers to the question “If you could design an app to help with your social media use, what would the topic be?” that she asks as part of the longitudinal surveys she began running in 2017 in middle schools. In addition, a youth advisory board of participants recruited from prior annual workshops chose self-esteem in social media as the focus for this past summer. “In my case, my group mates and I prepared a presentation about appearance self-esteem, focused on how media can impact how one feels about [one’s] own appearance, and how to manage that in the age of social media and AI,” Isacson explains.
Charmaraman considers Wellesley students’ perspectives critical to the workshops. “I want to make sure that students are involved from the very beginning,” she says. From conceiving research ideas to coding and interpreting data, students are part of all aspects of the project, and she says she has co-authored conference papers, book chapters, and journal articles with many of them. Student researchers, including those from her Calderwood EDUC 328/PSYC 322 course, have also participated in podcasts and written policy briefs with the data they have collected from the lab’s research, underscoring the collaborative nature of these spaces.
As part of the workshop, students curated a generative AI chatbot to communicate with participants surrounding a particular self-esteem issue that stems from five different domains: academic, appearance, online persona, friendships and relationships, and social identities. To facilitate a healthy and safe connection between participants and the chatbot, Charmaraman emphasized the importance of creating a chatbot that is “not too friendly to replace human relations, but friendly enough so if participants feel like they really just need a pep talk on self-esteem, that it’ll do the job without being its best friend,” she explains. Through a collaboration with Catherine Delcourt, an associate professor of computer science, the student researchers familiarized themselves with AI chatbots as well as what boundaries to set with them. Williams and Isacson emphasized this balance by including an AI literacy module in the lab.
Reflecting on the workshop, Williams and Isacson say they value the leadership and communication skills they learned from hosting the sessions. “One of the most daunting parts for me, and my partners as well, was engaging the workshop participants and fostering a comfortable and safe environment for them to explore over Zoom,” Isacson says. “I definitely gained confidence in my ability to lead activities for preteens and teenagers.”
Isacson hopes the middle school digital well-being workshop participants in the YMW lab gained the ability to understand chatbot technology and use it responsibly: “I remember having a lot of personal insecurities in middle school, and I hope that between the workshop mentors, our guest speakers, and the knowledge they gained from the small group activities, they were able to come out of the week with some tools to manage those insecurities and boost their self-esteem.”