Facebook is the largest social networking site worldwide, with over 1.5 billion monthly active users. Facebook use is especially high amongst young people, a demographic with increased risk for developing mental health problems.

An enormous advantage of using Facebook data is that it offers time-stamped, historical behavioural records of user profile information dating back to when the user first joined Facebook. Our team at the University of Cambridge has developed and published methodologies that directly extract this Facebook data from consented participants. We can complete this process within 5-15 minutes, with minimal burden on the participant. We are able to analyse various types of Facebook data, such as users preferences (e.g., "Likes") and status updates, their friendship network properties, and language use.

To our knowledge, no studies to date have combined longitudinal online Facebook data with pre-existing offline longitudinal cohort information. We are keen to collaborate with the ALSPAC study team to extract Facebook data from ALSPAC participants in order to pair this with their existing offline behaviour, cognition and other biological data. The aim of the collaboration would be to utilise this unique pairing of online-offline data to form and test new hypotheses and to explore putative causal relationships between online and offline measures related to mental health disorders, lifestyle choices and brain processing. This may help further our understanding of innovative approaches for early detection of risk factors (e.g., mental health ‘digital warning signs’), which could improve the onset of detection, intervention and appropriate service provision.