Shonairra Aradhya

Research

Evidence,
then advice.

I want to understand how thoughts and behaviour get shaped, which is cognitive and social psychology, and I want to use it on adolescence, because that is where the shaping is still happening and almost nobody asks the people it is happening to.

The paper

Parental phubbing, from the adolescent’s side.

Phubbing is what it is called when someone you are with picks up their phone instead. Most of the work on it asks adults about their relationships. This asks seventeen adolescents what it is like at their own kitchen table, in their own words.

My role
First author. Conducted all seventeen interviews, co-led the thematic analysis.
Partners
Indian Council of Medical Research, India’s apex medical research agency. NIMHANS, the country’s leading mental health institution.
Sample
17 adolescents, interviewed in person. Qualitative, thematic analysis.
Status
Manuscript under review, 2026.

Todo Note 3. One URL. A DOI, a preprint, a journal page or a PDF, whichever exists first. The card above becomes a link the moment it arrives, and everything else on this page can stay as short as it now is.

In progress

Two open questions.

Study / in progress

Belonging in boarding schools

How a sense of belonging shapes mental wellness for adolescents who live where they study. I am inside the sample, seven days a week, which is a methodological problem and also the reason I can see the question at all.

Book / in development

A book on teen mental health

Written from inside adolescence rather than about it. It is being drafted alongside the research that feeds it, and it will be finished after.

Next

Where this goes.

A psychology degree first. I have been running circles and doing interviews without the frameworks that explain what I am looking at, and I would like the frameworks.

After that, social entrepreneurship in mental wellness and education. The test I care about is whether findings turn into something a school can actually run.