b'EXPLORING SOCIAL INTERACTION AMONG YOUTH IN SINGAPORES URBAN SPACES AND ONLINE PLATFORMS DURING THE COVID-19 PANDEMICLiau Wanting Perlene, Ooi Jia De, Sherlyn Lee Yee Ying, Randall Tham Wen-JunIntroductionWith increased urbanisation around the world, there is an increasing focus on how urbanspaces affect human interactions. In Singapore, youth (aged 16 to 25 years old) interactions are animportant point of focus as the next generation of Singaporeans. Mehta, a prominent figure inurban design, suggested that a good urban, public space is one that "supports, facilitates andpromotes social interactions" among people from different backgrounds in 2007. However, studiesexploring social interactions in urban spaces found contradicting results when compared with eachother. For example, Mehta (2018) found that places with shade had little effect on socialinteractions, but Rasidi and researchers (2012) concluded the opposite. This study seeks to betterunderstand how the characteristics of urban spaces shape social interaction among youths, andthe relationship between youths online and offline interaction. The lines of enquiry for the studywere provided by the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA)1.MethodologyA pilot study consisting of online social mediascan, interviews and survey was first conducted togather preliminary findings about youths definition ofsocial interaction, the places they have been to, onlineplatforms they used and how they switch conversations between the physical and online world.Step 1: A social media scan was run, where researchers looked up youths Instagram accounts.Step 2: Researchers conducted online interviews with a small group of youths. Afterwards, findingsgathered from both steps were used to run a more in-depth pilot survey. Step 3: The pilot surveywas sent to a larger group of youths to discover their most frequented places and online platformsused for social interactions. Step 4: Findings gathered from the pilot were used to develop themethodology and procedures for the main study, which was comprised of naturalistic observationsand semi-structured interviews (see Figure 1).The naturalistic observation was conducted to find how various characteristics and featuresof urban spaces shape social interactions among the youth in Singapore, and how COVID-19changed youths face-to-face (FTF) social interaction in physical environments. Participants forinterviews were recruited from observation sites. These interviews sought to understand: (1)places youths visited before COVID-19 and their social interaction at these places, (2) if COVID-19disrupted their physical social interactions, (3) how youths interact on online platforms, (4) howtransitions between the physical and online medium occurred before COVID-19, (5) If COVID-19affected online social interaction, (6) if COVID-19 affected the transition between the physical andonline medium, and (7) ideal place(s) for socialisation that youths wished for in a decades time.FindingsOverall, researchers found that youths like to socialise in public spaces that support theirrecreational needs and interests, and it is only in such places do youths from differentbackgrounds have a chance to mingle and socialise. This finding is also similar to what researchersobserved in online social platforms; youths will only interact with strangers if they are involvedwith discussion threads about a specific interest.1The findings from this study are not endorsed by URA7TH PSYCHOLOGY STUDIES 48STUDENT CONFERENCE 2021'