A study of 300,000 adolescents
and parents in the UK and USA shows that only 0.4% of wellbeing in adolescents
is associated with technology use. Comparatively, eating potatoes has
nearly as negative an effect, and wearing glasses has a more negative effect on
adolescent mental health than screen use.
Researchers at the University of Oxford have performed the most
definitive study to date on the relationship between technology use and
adolescent mental health, examining data from over 300,000 teenagers and parents
in the UK and USA. At most, only 0.4% of adolescent wellbeing is related to
screen use – which only slightly surpasses the negative effect of regularly
eating potatoes. The findings were published today in Nature Human Behaviour.
'Our findings demonstrate that screen use itself has at most a
tiny association with youth mental health,' said lead researcher Professor
Andrew Przybylski, Director of Research at the Oxford Internet Institute,
University of Oxford. 'The 0.4% contribution of screen use on young people’s
mental health needs to be put in context for parents and policymakers. Within
the same dataset, we were able to demonstrate that including potatoes in your
diet showed a similar association with adolescent wellbeing. Wearing corrective
lenses had an even worse association.'
In comparison, smoking marijuana and being bullied was found, on
average, to have a 2.7 times and 4.3 times more negative association with
adolescent mental health than screen use. Activities like getting enough sleep
and eating breakfast, often overlooked in media coverage, had a much stronger
association with wellbeing than technology use.
The method used by the researchers, called Specification Curve
Analysis, revealed the reason there seems to be no firm scientific consensus on
screen use and mental health. 'Even when using the same datasets, each
researcher brings different biases with them and analyses the data slightly
differently,' said Amy Orben, College Lecturer at the Queen’s College,
University of Oxford, and author on the study. 'Of the three datasets we
analysed for this study, we found over 600 million possible ways to analyse the
data. We calculated a large sample of these and found that – if you wanted –
you could come up with a large range of positive or negative associations
between technology and wellbeing, or no effect at all.'
'We needed to take the topic beyond cherry-picked results, so we
developed an approach that helped us harvest the whole orchard,' added
Professor Przybylski.
In order to remove bias and examine practical significance (rather
than statistical significance), the researchers used information from other
questions in the same dataset to put the statistical findings on screen use in
context. 'Research’s reliance on statistical significance can yield bizarre
‘results’', said Orben. 'We need to look at the size of the association to make
a judgement on practical significance. If you told me the amount of time a
teenager spends on digital devices, I could not do very well predicting their
overall wellbeing, as only 0.4% is associated with technology use.'
'Bias and selective reporting of results is endemic to social and
biological research influencing the screen time debate,' added Professor
Przybylski. 'We need to put scientific findings in context for parents,
policymakers and the general public. Our approach provides an excellent
template for data scientists wanting to make the most of the excellent cohort
data available in the UK and beyond.'
The full paper, 'The association between adolescent well-being and digital
technology use,' can be read in the journal Nature Human
Behaviour.
The data was drawn from three large-scale representative datasets:
Monitoring the Future (USA), Youth Risks and Behaviour Studies (USA) and the
Millennium Cohort Study (UK), totalling over 300,000 individuals surveyed
between 2007 and 2016. The findings were derived using Specification Analysis
Curve method, which examined the full range of correlations relating digital
technology use to child and adolescent psychological wellbeing. Details on
methodology and all necessary code to reproduce the analysis are available in
the paper’s supplementary material.
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