During my first two weeks working with Dr. Keng-Yen Huang on several research projects on Asian American mental health behavior and intervention, I found it interested in looking into the framework of health literacy and how health communication methods influence health behavior among minority groups. These projects focus more on adolescent/ young adults’ mental health in minority groups, and lots of articles and studies mention that social media and their peers greatly influence the mental health situation among young adults.
Adolescents are usually strongly influenced by their peers and social media platforms. Within a strong sense of “fear of missing out” and seeking group acceptance, they tend to receive lots of pressure when using social media. Especially when it goes to social comparison and pressure to stay connected, their mental health condition worsens under peer pressure, and they tend to suffer from anxiety and depression. The situation gets worse among Asian American adolescents due to their living pressure not only from their peers but also from their families.
To know more about how Asian American students/ young adults suffer from depression and anxiety in their lives, we develop representative stories for 1st and 2nd generation Asian American adolescents/young adults of diverse backgrounds to understand their mental health challenges) using the human-centered design/method. Through interviewing and persona development, we found that Asian American young adults tend to receive colossal pressure from their peers and their families. They show that juggling different roles, expectations, and identities lead to feelings of being an outsider and, consequently, inner conflict. Also, after looking into their lives and stories, we found that young adults need to learn to be true to themselves despite shifting between different contexts and roles to reduce role conflict. They also need support navigating through their beliefs/expectations, developing better communication skills to advocate their needs to their parents, and improving the parent-child relationship. Especially when the parents have different frameworks of success than their children, the depression and anxiety get worse.
My next step will be researching health communication on social media and content design, looking into what kind of content will influence young adults more and what health communication method is more accepted among adolescents. Overall, we would like to design and hold community workshops for Asian American young adults talking about their depression on using social media and experiencing the Anti-Asian conflicts under the COVID-19 pandemic.