About

Candice L. Odgers is a researcher dedicated to advancing adolescent health and wellbeing. Her team develops and shares tools and resources for the broader community working in this field. These include various projects and open-source protocols aimed at understanding and improving adolescent experiences, such as the Google Street View Project, Neighborhood Dashboard, iSee, RAISE Data and Codebooks, and an AI Use and Perceptions in K-12 Education protocol. Her work emphasizes open access and community engagement, contributing valuable tools and data resources to support research and interventions in adolescent health.

Research topics

• Medicine
• Psychiatry
• Environmental health
• Internal medicine
• Developmental psychology
• Psychology
• Pediatrics
• Clinical psychology
• Demography
• Gerontology

Selected publications

• Capturing inflammatory reactivity to acute psychosocial stress in plasma and saliva among adolescents

  Brain Behavior and Immunity · 2026-04-03

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Everyday Discrimination and Adolescents’ Mental Health: Evidence From an Ecological Momentary Assessment

  The Journal of Early Adolescence · 2026-01-07

  articleSenior authorCorresponding

  Adolescents who report discrimination experience worse mental health. However, most research has been cross-sectional and retrospective. This study investigated how prospectively-assessed day-to-day perceptions of everyday discrimination relate to mental health symptoms in 395 adolescents across a 14-day ecological momentary assessment. Black adolescents reported discrimination on more days (15%) than White adolescents (6%), as did economically disadvantaged (11%) versus non-disadvantaged adolescents (6%). On days adolescents reported experiencing versus not experiencing discrimination, they reported elevated depression, anxiety, inattention ( β s = 0.06-0.10), and conduct problem ( OR = 3.03) symptoms. Cross-lagged multi-level models showed few next-day associations, except that discrimination predicted adolescents’ next-day inattention (but not vice-versa; β = .06) and conduct problems predicted next-day discrimination reports ( OR = 1.73; but not vice versa). Findings highlight that, even at this young age, Black and economically disadvantaged adolescents report frequent exposure to everyday discrimination, with robust linkages between perceived discrimination and same-day mental health symptoms.

  PublisherDOI

• Perceptions of AI-Driven EdTech: Nationwide Survey and Focus Group Insights from Key End Users

  ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction · 2026-02-25

  article

  Schoolchildren in the United States are increasingly exposed to educational technologies (EdTech), many of which are or will be infused with Artificial Intelligence (AI). Despite this growing integration, there is limited understanding of the current perceptions and attitudes toward EdTech with AI among parents, teachers, and teens. To address this gap, we conducted a mixed-method study involving an A/B experiment through an online survey with 3,051 participants and complemented by focus group discussions with 80 participants. Providing a comprehensive snapshot of AI perception in education in 2024, our findings indicate that participants, particularly teachers, may hold more negative perceptions of our AI-powered EdTech mock-up compared to the one powered by human tutors. Based on these insights, we discuss the future of EdTech regarding the current perceptions. This research contributes to an empirical understanding of the perceptions and attitudes toward AI in K-12 education, providing valuable insights through a comprehensive national survey and in-depth focus group sessions.

  PublisherDOI

• Adolescent Mental Health Outcomes and Screen Use before and after School Phone Restrictions in Iceland: A Population-Based Difference-In-Differences Analysis

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2026-01-01

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Author response for "Social media use, online experiences, and loneliness among young adults: A cohort study"

  2025-01-31

  peer-reviewSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Testing the feasibility of passive sensing among adolescents: Implications for mental health.

  Journal of Psychopathology and Clinical Science · 2025-10-02 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  = 131) participated in a 90-day passive sensing study, which collected data on both digital (keystroke and app usage) and offline (sleep and physical activity) behaviors. Although correlations indicated a small signal between same-day mental health indicators and several passively sensed variables (e.g., proportion of typed negative words and call behaviors), associations typically disappeared when disaggregating between- from within-person associations. Additionally, participation uptake was low, but there was little evidence of bias in participation or data coverage based on mental health risk or demographics. Results demonstrate the feasibility of collecting passive sensing data with a diverse sample of adolescents, but barriers remain on adolescent willingness to engage in this research and the strength of signal between passively sensed variables and self-report constructs. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

  PublisherDOI

• Cybervictimisation and mental health conditions in young people: findings from a nationally representative longitudinal cohort

  The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health · 2025-12-08 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  BACKGROUND: Cybervictimisation has been linked to poor mental health in young people, but doubts remain about the robustness of this association. We examined mental health outcomes for adolescents who experienced cybervictimisation using a genetically informative longitudinal design to strengthen causal inference by accounting for alternative explanations. METHODS: We used data from the Environmental Risk (E-Risk) Longitudinal Twin Study, a nationally representative cohort of 2232 British twins born in 1994-95. We included participants who completed interviews assessing cybervictimisation and mulitple offline forms of victimisation since age 12 years, and a range of mental health conditions at age 18 years. Confounders were measured prospectively from ages 5 years to 18 years. Unmeasured confounders including genetic and shared environmental factors were controlled for using discordant twin analyses. People with lived experience were not involved in this study. FINDINGS: 2066 participants completed assessments at age 18 years, of whom 2063 (99·9%) had data on cybervictimisation. The mean age of the twins at the time of the assessment was 18·4 years (SD 0·4), and 1870 (90·5%) identified as White, 84 (4·1%) as Asian, 40 (1·9%) as Black, eight (0·4%) as mixed race, and 64 (3·1%) as other ethnicities. 419 (20·3%) of 2063 young people reported being moderately or severely cybervictimised between ages 12 years and 18 years, with ten (2·4%) participants reporting online abuse without having experienced offline victimisation. Cybervictimised adolescents were more likely to report generalised anxiety disorder, major depressive disorder, self-harm or suicide attempt, post-traumatic stress disorder, conduct disorder, and psychotic experiences compared with those not cybervictimised. These associations remained after adjusting for confounders, including individual characteristics (sex assigned at birth, minority ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and childhood intelligence quotient), pre-existing vulnerabilities (previous mental health conditions and online and offline victimisation), and concurrent vulnerabilities (problematic digital technology use and loneliness). Offline victimisation accounted for the associations, with modest to substantial attenuation in odds ratios (17·7-28·0% for generalised anxiety disorder and major depressive disorder; 33·5-52·3% for other outcomes). Cybervictimisation was uniquely associated with generalised anxiety disorder independently of genetic and shared environmental factors and offline victimisation (odds ratio 2·14 [95% CI 1·18-3·88]). INTERPRETATION: Amid ongoing policy debates on digital safety and to support targeted intervention strategies, mental health responses to cybervictimisation should consider the broader context of victimisation experienced by young people. FUNDING: UK Medical Research Council, US National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and Jacobs Foundation.

  PublisherDOI

• Author response for "Social media use, online experiences, and loneliness among young adults: A cohort study"

  2025-03-24

  peer-reviewSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Learning Variability Network Exchange (LEVANTE): A Global Framework for Measuring Children's Learning Variability Through Collaborative Data Sharing

  Child Development · 2025-08-02 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  Despite the ubiquity of variation in child development within individuals, across groups, and across tasks, timescales, and contexts, dominant methods in developmental science and education research still favor group averages, short snapshots of time, and single environments. The Learning Variability Network Exchange (LEVANTE) is a framework designed to enable coordinated data collection by research teams worldwide, with the goal of measuring variability in children's learning and development. The LEVANTE measure set aims to capture variability in learning outcomes (literacy and numeracy) as well as in core cognitive and social constructs. LEVANTE will yield a large, open access longitudinal dataset for long-term research use, both creating a multidisciplinary research network and facilitating the science of learning variability.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Social media use, online experiences, and loneliness among young adults: A cohort study

  Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2025-05-11 · 10 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  This study investigated patterns of digital technology use and their associations with loneliness in a cohort of 1632 young adults (mean age 26) in the UK who had been followed prospectively since childhood by the Environmental Risk Longitudinal Twin Study. Data were collected via an online survey in 2019-2020. Although overall time spent online was associated with greater loneliness, this was not the case for social media usage specifically. Use of social media platforms (e.g., Facebook, Instagram, Twitter) showed no association with loneliness. Instead, greater loneliness was associated with the use of Reddit and dating apps, while the use of WhatsApp was associated with lower loneliness. However, individuals who reported more compulsive use of digital technology, or experiences of online victimization, were lonelier on average, suggesting that the types of experiences individuals encounter online may be more related to loneliness than using particular platforms per se. Associations were robust to controls for a prior history of depression or anxiety at age 18. Moreover, findings remained broadly consistent between those who participated before versus during COVID-19 lockdown measures. An exception was that certain types of media characterized by passive consumption were associated with loneliness prior to, but not during lockdown.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Terrie E. Moffitt

  Center for Genomic Science

  156 shared

• Avshalom Caspi

  University of Oslo

  127 shared

• Andrea Danese

  King's College London

  87 shared

• Louise Arseneault

  University of the West of England

  86 shared

• Helen L. Fisher

  King's College London

  64 shared

• F Mr

  48 shared

• William Copeland

  University of Vermont

  37 shared

• Séverine Frère

  Territoires, Villes, Environnement & Société

  34 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Developmental and Quantitative Psychology

  University of Virginia

• Other, Postdoctoral Research

  Social and Genetic Psychiatry Center

Awards & honors

• Association for Psychological Science award
• Canadian Institutes for Health Research award
• Jacobs Foundation award
• Society for Research in Child Development award
• William T. Grant Foundation award