ORCHID: Online Risks and Resilience in Children’s Daily Lives

Between ages 8 and 10 years, children become more independent, while digital technology plays a growing role in how they learn, play, communicate, and connect with others. The ORCHID study works with children, parents, and teachers to better understand and measure these online experiences and develop family-focused resources to support children’s digital wellbeing.

Background

By the age of 10, many children go online every day and use several connected devices, including smartphones, tablets, and computers. This reflects a multi-platform ecology of digital access. Importantly, their digital use is becoming more independent and individualised, often taking place in less supervised settings, particularly during the evening. Many children also begin accessing the internet through their first personal device. This creates valuable opportunities for learning, connection, and play, but may also introduce new risks.

Understanding children’s online experiences is therefore crucial. However, there is currently a lack of robust, developmentally appropriate tools for measuring these experiences. As a result, our understanding of how digital engagement affects children’s wellbeing, mental health, and development remains limited.

Study Aims

In the ORCHID project, we will work closely with children, parents, and teachers to explore:

The digital activities children engage in.

The cognitive and emotional responses these activities evoke.

The social influences that shape children’s online experiences during middle childhood.

These insights will inform the co-development of new tools for children and parents that can capture the complexity of children’s online experiences. The resulting measures will then undergo rigorous psychometric evaluation to assess their reliability and validity.

In parallel, we will work with families to co-design the structure and key components of a family-focused digital wellbeing intervention. The intervention will aim to support a shared understanding of digital experiences between children and parents. Its longer-term goal is to promote awareness, agency, and positive digital habits throughout middle-to-late childhood.

Overall, the ORCHID project will deliver validated measurement tools alongside preliminary intervention materials co-designed with families.

This project has been generously funded by the Huo Family Foundation and is conducted in collaboration with King’s College London, the University of Edinburgh, and the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Methods

The project will integrate qualitative and quantitative approaches across five interconnected work packages to: explore children’s online experiences, co-develop and test new measurement tools and co-design with families a platform for a digital wellbeing intervention.

Understanding children’s digital lives

Creative and participatory research with children, alongside interviews with parents and teachers, will explore children’s digital activities, emotional responses, and strategies for managing their experiences.

Co-designing measurement tools

The project will adapt and develop child- and parent-report versions of a digital activity framework through workshops, expert consultation, and iterative testing to ensure clarity, relevance, and usability.

Psychometric validation

Large-scale data collection with families will evaluate the reliability and validity of the new tools, ensuring they are robust, developmentally appropriate, and applicable across diverse populations.

Developing an intervention platform

Findings will inform the co-design of a family-focused digital wellbeing intervention, including a theory of change, prototype resources, and a delivery framework to support positive digital engagement.

Dissemination and impact

The project will engage academic, policy, and public audiences through publications, events, and accessible resources, ensuring that findings translate into real-world impact.

The preceding project: DIORA

ORCHID builds on its predecessor, the DIORA study (Dynamic Interplay between Online Risk and Resilience in Adolescence), which explored distinct types of digital activities, the psychological reactions they evoke, and how these experiences differentially relate to adolescent mental health. The ORCHID extends this work to younger children, examining how online experiences may differ between childhood and adolescence and identifying factors that can support positive digital experiences across development stages.

Team

Principal Investigator

	Dr Kasia Kostyrka-Allchorne is a lecturer in the Department of Psychology at Queen Mary University of London. Kasia’s research broadly concerns risks and opportunities created by access to digital technology within the context of family and child and adolescent mental health. This includes developing evidence-based parenting interventions that use mobile phone technology to provide low-cost and scalable support for parents of young children both in the community and within children’s health services. She is also interested in examining the mechanisms that underpin the associations between childhood and adolescent mental health difficulties and digital engagement. Follow Kasia on LinkedIn
Co-investigators
	Jennifer Lau is Professor of Youth Resilience and Co-Director of the Youth Resilience Unit at Queen Mary University of London. Her research focuses on understanding the risk mechanisms underlying anxiety, depression, and loneliness across childhood and adolescence. She is also committed to translating basic science into targeted interventions, co-produced with young people and stakeholders through multidisciplinary and cross-sector collaboration. Follow Jennifer on LinkedIn
	Sonia Livingstone  DPhil (Oxon), FBA, FBPS, FAcSS, FRSA, OBE is a professor in the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She has published 20 books including “The Class: Living and Learning in the Digital Age” and Parenting for a Digital Future (July 2020). She directs the projects “Children’s Data and Privacy Online,” “Global Kids Online” (with UNICEF) and “Parenting for a Digital Future”, and she is Deputy Director of the UKRI-funded “Nurture Network.” Since founding the 33-country EU Kids Online network, Sonia has advised the UK government, European Commission, European Parliament, Council of Europe, OECD and ITU. Follow Sonia on LinkedIn
	Aja Murray  is Professor of Psychology in the Department of Psychology at the University of Edinburgh. Her research focuses on the developmental aspects of mental health, particularly ADHD, internalising problems, and their co-occurrence, alongside advanced quantitative methods such as longitudinal, ecological momentary assessment, and measurement burst designs. She leads several projects, including the Mental Health in the Moment (MHIM) studies, the DigiCAT project, and the development of digital interventions for emotion dysregulation in ADHD. Follow Aja on Linkedin
	Edmund Sonuga-Barke is Professor of Developmental Psychology, Psychiatry and Neuroscience at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King’s College London. Inspired by his own childhood experiences his research focuses on understanding neuro-developmental disorders and their mental health consequences across the life span. To this end, he employs basic developmental science approaches to study the pathogenesis of such conditions, their underlying genetic and environmental risk and resilience sources and their mediating brain mechanisms. Professor Sonuga-Barke was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (2016), a Fellow of the British Academy (2018), amongst the ‘most influential scientific minds’ in psychology and psychiatry by Clarivate (2018) and an Honorary Professor at Aarhus University, Denmark (2019).

Researchers

	Dr Mariya Stoilova holds a postdoctoral research position at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). With a strong focus on multi-method evidence generation and cross-national comparative analyses, her work focuses on the intersection of child rights and digital technology use, well-being and family support, and intimate life, citizenship and social inequalities. Follow Mariya on LinkedIn
	Dr Peiyao Tang is a Research Associate based at Queen Mary University of London and the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King’s College London. Peiyao is interested in the cognitive and emotional risk and resilience factors in young people's mental health, with a particular interest in depression and anxiety disorders. Her work broadly encompasses future-oriented thinking, digital experiences, resilience, and child and adolescent mental health. Peiyao adopts mix-methods approaches, including systematic review and meta-analysis, qualitative interviews, focus groups, questionnaire development and psychometric validation, and longitudinal data collection and analyses. Follow Peiyao on LinkedIn
	Dr Ellen Hedström is a Research Associate working on the ORCHID project. She completed her undergraduate studies in Psychology at the University of Winnipeg, Canada, her Masters of Psychology at the University of Kristianstad, Sweden, and her PhD in Psychology at the University of Southampton in England. Ellen's research focus has been on the effect of parenting stress on asylum seeking families in a post migration setting. As a developmental psychologist, she is also interested in neuropsychiatric disorders in young people, risk and resilience and the effects of parenting stress and parental risk factors. She recently completed a five year RCT exploring the efficacy and cost effectiveness of a parenting app, STEPS, for parents of children waiting for an ADHD diagnosis. Ellen brings over 20 years of experience of planning and implementing treatment for young people aged 10-16 with neuropsychiatric disorders and working with parents and children to implement tools and strategies to support parenting. Follow Ellen on LinkedIn
	Chloe McPherson  is a Research Assistant in the Department of Psychology at Queen Mary University London. Chloe completed an MSc in Health Psychology at King’s College London. She has also worked on several research projects at King's, including studies of child cognitive development, diversity and inclusion in research, and digital health interventions. Her current research interests focus on children's online experiences, digital wellbeing, and family-focused interventions.  Follow Chloe on LinkedIn
	Zahra Ibrahim Ahmed Yusuf is a psychology student at QMUL, starting her placement year where she will be part of Dr Kasia Kostyrka-Allchorne's team as a student assistant researcher. Follow Zahra on LinkedIn
Professional staff	Sarah Braun is a Project Coordinator within the Centre for Psychiatry and Mental Health, where she supports the Centre co-leads in the delivery of research studies and affiliated projects. Her role includes coordinating patient and public involvement, managing internal communications, and facilitating collaboration across research and training activities. Prior to joining QMUL, she worked at the European Council on Foreign Relations, where she gained experience in governance, stakeholder engagement, and communications. Sarah hold an MSc in Comparative Politics from the London School of Economics. Follow Sarah on LinkedIn

#DigitalBalance

Alongside our research into young people’s online experiences, we created the #DigitalBalance series — a practical, evidence-informed resource co-created with young people aged 13–18. Watch the first animation on the left or explore the full series below.

The DIORA Study

Read about the study that preceded ORCHID: the Dynamic Interplay of Online Risk and Resilience in Adolescence Study

The #DigitalBalance Animation Series

Young people's voices and supporting more enjoyable online experiences

Publications

Publications and resources from the DIORA study

Interested in finding out more or have a question?

Get in touch with the Project Lead, Kasia, at k.kostyrka-allchorne@qmul.ac.uk, or contact the ORCHID team at ORCHID@qmul.ac.uk.

Global main menu

Study at Queen Mary

Experience Queen Mary

Subjects

Research and Innovation

Research by faculties and centres

Collaborations and partnerships