Extreme weather and mental health content on social media: Promoting racial and ethnic minority youth psychosocial resilience

Extreme weather events are a global crisis, placing harm on the health and well-being of young people and future generations. Consequentially, young people are experiencing significant psychological distress related to extreme weather events. Extreme weather events also worsen health disparities among youth from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and racial and ethnic minority youth. Young people are increasingly responding to extreme weather concerns through social media. Unfortunately, social media can have emotional consequences, exposing youth to a higher volume of information about extreme weather events without strategies for managing distress. The current study will explore how racial and ethnic minority youth experiences with behavioral responses via social media confer youth risk and resilience for psychopathology and impact behavioral responses to inform prevention efforts that reduce extreme weather-related mental health consequences and health disparities. In Aim 1, will use social network analysis and content analysis to elucidate network properties and content of influential social media accounts that post about extreme weather to inform strategies that may enhance the reach and uptake of messages centering racial and ethnic minority youth mental health promotion. Aim 2 will draw on youth participatory action methods using ethnographic tools to explore racial and ethnic minority youth perceptions of how engaging with extreme weather content on social media impacts mental health and behaviors. In Aim 3, we will retain a subset of youth from Aim 2 and recruit adult experts to co-design an extreme weather social media campaign to promote racial and ethnic minority youth well-being and behavioral responses, informed by theory and findings from Aims 1 and 2 on resilience building extreme weather communication strategies. We will collect pilot data regarding racial and ethnic minority youth perceptions of campaign feasibility and acceptability, as well as youth and adult perceptions of the partnership process. Successful completion of these aims will contribute to the NIH Initiative Strategic Framework to understand the effects of extreme weather-induced stress on youth development and NIMHD Priority Research Areas to reduce the effects of extreme weather among populations who experience health disparities looking at multiple domains (i.e., behavioral, sociocultural) and multiple levels (i.e., individual, interpersonal) of influence.