DIGI-BALANCE EU Experimental Evidence on Digital Leisure, Learning Outcomes and Mental HealthHORIZON-CL2-2026-01-TRANSFO-04

DIGI-BALANCE EU investigates the causal impact of digital leisure activities and communication practices on young people’s educational outcomes, cognitive development and mental health across early childhood and primary education. Despite growing concerns about digital distraction, social media exposure and gaming patterns, existing evidence remains largely correlational and insufficiently grounded in EU-specific educational contexts. Policymakers therefore lack rigorous experimental evidence to guide regulation and balanced digital strategies.

The project will implement experimental and quasi-experimental research designs to assess how different forms of digital leisure use — including social media engagement, video gaming, messaging applications and smartphone use outside school — affect attention span, concentration, learning motivation, memory, study habits and socio-emotional well-being. Particular focus will be placed on early childhood and primary education stages, where cognitive and behavioural foundations are formed.

A core pilot site will be established in Küçükçekmece Municipality (Istanbul, Türkiye), which operates more than ten municipal early childhood education centres (ECEC). These centres will function as a living laboratory, enabling longitudinal data collection and controlled intervention design in collaboration with families, educators and municipal social services. The municipal setting provides a diverse socio-economic environment, allowing analysis of variations across income groups, migration backgrounds and family digital literacy levels.

The project will combine experience sampling methods, behavioural attention assessments, validated mental health scales, and educational performance indicators. Interventions will include structured parental digital literacy programmes, digital balance guidance models and controlled digital exposure strategies, tested against comparison groups.

DIGI-BALANCE EU will deliver:

• A Causal Digital Impact Model for early childhood and primary education

• An Evidence-Based Municipal Digital Balance Toolkit

• Policy recommendations for regulating and guiding smartphone and digital leisure use

• A scalable EU framework supporting healthy, development-enhancing digital engagement

By integrating rigorous scientific methods with municipal-level experimentation, DIGI-BALANCE EU will generate policy-relevant, transferable and ethically grounded evidence to support a balanced digital environment for children in Europe.