As Australia’s first-in-kind social media ban draws global attention, research on its effects is critical to informing future policy decisions worldwide.

In late 2025, Australia became the first nation to ban social media access for children under 16—a policy with significant implications for child development, family dynamics, and digital governance worldwide. Yet as implementation approached, critical questions remained unanswered: How would parents enforce these restrictions? What challenges would families face? How would children’s well-being and behavior change? Without baseline data captured before the enactment of the ban, researchers and policymakers would have no way to measure the ban’s actual effects or distinguish policy impacts from normal developmental changes.

The Kids Research Institute sought a nationally representative study to capture families’ experiences both before and after implementation—generating evidence to guide parenting support, inform future policy refinements, and contribute to global understanding of children’s digital well-being. 

NORC designed and fielded a rapid probability survey to capture family experiences before and after the ban.

NORC developed a two-wave study of parents with children aged 9-16, structured to follow the same families as the policy took effect. The first wave captured baseline measures prior to the enactment of the ban in December 2025. A follow-on survey in June 2026 will produce the only nationally representative dataset designed to measure the ban’s early effects on parenting practices, family dynamics, and child outcomes. 

To achieve national representativeness under severe time constraints, NORC deployed a probability-based mobile random digit dialing (RDD) design, sending SMS invitations to randomly-generated Australian mobile numbers and directing respondents to a self-administered web survey (computer-assisted web interviewing, CAWI). Unlike convenience or opt-in panels, this approach ensured equal selection probabilities across the Australian population, enabled appropriate statistical weighting, and improved coverage of hard-to-reach demographic groups—critical for understanding how diverse families experience the restrictions. 

NORC collaborated with The Kids Research Institute Australia throughout the research process, including study design, instrument development and testing, sampling, data collection, and weighting. The team delivered cleaned analysis-ready datasets with full documentation. Plans for the second wave include potential expansion to youth surveys and qualitative data collection, as well as development of an interactive dashboard designed to incorporate comparable data from other countries.