NEENAH, Wis. — For many, scrolling through social media feeds has become a port of their day. From one popular site to the next viral video, social media helps stay connected with friends and family. 

But for two Neenah teen girls, Isabel Yoblonski and Destinee Ramos, who are all about keeping their followers updated, decided to take a closer look at how these interactions were affecting their sleep and overall health.

Last year, the high schoolers participated in a school-led competition that aimed to tackle an issue they saw in their own community though scientific data and research. Both decided social media and its impacts was the topic to look into, making themselves their focus group to collect data. 

“Our experiment was that we were going to take three days off social media completely just to see what it did to our physical health with the watch,” 17-year-old Ramos said. “So I was off of media, I gained 4 hours of deep sleep which I was never able to do with social media.” 

What started as a school assignment, will now become a passion project as they plan to launch their own study in the fall. 

“[We] modified our pilot study to fit a 50 person sample size and we’re hoping to get teenage girls, that’s our target audience through nationwide,” Yoblanski, 18, said. “We have a few platforms that we can get individuals from to join our study.”

With leadership from non-profit research organizations like CustomED and PhysioQ, the research conducted will track quality of sleep, heart rate and overall physical health. Future participants will self report data captured by small watches that will be worn throughout the study. 

Dr. Emily Weinstein with Project Zero at the Harvard School of Education is one of the mentors Yoblonski and Ramos will be checking in with weekly as they collect data. This project stands as one of the only current studies led by teenage girls in the country.

“Having research that’s really led and driven by teens just changes the kinds of questions that we think to investigate and the ways that we think about solutions and interpreting data,” said Dr. Weinstein. “So it’s just incredibly exciting to have them leading this work.”

Research submission costs that verify and officiate data can cost thousands. Currently, the teen girls are in an effort to crowdfund for those expenses in hopes of being trailblazers for other young girls interested in STEM and research careers. 

 “[They] can know that they have a place in the scientific community,” said Ramos. “Researchers will recognize them as a real researcher and not just as a high schooler who’s trying to do some fling when we can take it seriously and we can publish a study.”

The teen girls have set up a GoFundMe account to raise a $7,000 goal.