Lab Director Awarded International Research Grant

We are thrilled to announce that our Lab Director, Albert Malkin, has been awarded the International Research Grant from Western's Faculty of Education. This grant will support international collaboration to develop a comprehensive, culturally-validation assessment battery for social media use research.

The International Research Grant is awarded to full-time faculty members to establish and strengthen collaborative relationships with international partners.

With this support, our lab will collaborate with researchers at the University of Iceland to systematically validate a social media assessment battery across Canadian and Icelandic populations. This grant provides exciting opportunities to build on completed Icelandic validation of the Social Media Use Functional Assessment (SMUFA). We will translate and validate our complete assessment toolkit: SMUFA, Social Media Purchase Task (SMPT), Social Media Use Discounting (SMUD), Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) protocols, and structured interviews.

The collaboration leverages Karl Gunnarsson's (University of Iceland) behavior science expertise and preliminary validation work supervised by Hanna Steinunn Steingrímsdóttir (Reykjavík University/Oslo Metropolitan University). Bidirectional research visits will facilitate knowledge exchange, cultural adaptation refinement, and methodological innovation.

We look forward to the discoveries and innovations that will emerge from this project.