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Is Screen Time Good or Bad? It's Not That Simple (techcrunch.com)
TechCrunch's Devin Coldeway picks apart a new study by Oxford scientists that questions the basis of thousands of papers and analyses with conflicting conclusions on the effect of screen time on well-being. "The researchers claim is that the science doesn't agree because it's bad science," Coldeway writes. "So is screen time good or bad? It's not that simple." From the report: Their concern was that the large data sets and statistical methods employed by researchers looking into the question -- for example, thousands and thousands of survey responses interacting with weeks of tracking data for each respondent -- allowed for anomalies or false positives to be claimed as significant conclusions. It's not that people are doing this on purpose necessarily, only that it's a natural result of the approach many are taking. "Unfortunately," write the researchers in the paper, "the large number of participants in these designs means that small effects are easily publishable and, if positive, garner outsized press and policy attention."
In order to show this, the researchers essentially redid the statistical analysis for several of these large data sets (Orben explains the process here), but instead of only choosing one result to present, they collected all the plausible ones they could find. For example, imagine a study where the app use of a group of kids was tracked, and they were surveyed regularly on a variety of measures. The resulting (fictitious, I hasten to add) paper might say it found kids who use Instagram for more than two hours a day are three times as likely to suffer depressive episodes or suicidal ideations. What the paper doesn't say, and which this new analysis could show, is that the bottom quartile is far more likely to suffer from ADHD, or the top five percent reported feeling they had a strong support network. [...] Ultimately what the Oxford study found was that there is no consistent good or bad effect, and although a very slight negative effect was noted, it was small enough that factors like having a single parent or needing to wear glasses were far more important. "[T]he study does not conclude that technology has no negative or positive effect; such a broad conclusion would be untenable on its face," Coldeway writes. "The data it rounds up are simply inadequate to the task and technology use is too variable to reduce to a single factor. Its conclusion is that studies so far have in fact bee inconclusive and we need to go back to the drawing board."
In order to show this, the researchers essentially redid the statistical analysis for several of these large data sets (Orben explains the process here), but instead of only choosing one result to present, they collected all the plausible ones they could find. For example, imagine a study where the app use of a group of kids was tracked, and they were surveyed regularly on a variety of measures. The resulting (fictitious, I hasten to add) paper might say it found kids who use Instagram for more than two hours a day are three times as likely to suffer depressive episodes or suicidal ideations. What the paper doesn't say, and which this new analysis could show, is that the bottom quartile is far more likely to suffer from ADHD, or the top five percent reported feeling they had a strong support network. [...] Ultimately what the Oxford study found was that there is no consistent good or bad effect, and although a very slight negative effect was noted, it was small enough that factors like having a single parent or needing to wear glasses were far more important. "[T]he study does not conclude that technology has no negative or positive effect; such a broad conclusion would be untenable on its face," Coldeway writes. "The data it rounds up are simply inadequate to the task and technology use is too variable to reduce to a single factor. Its conclusion is that studies so far have in fact bee inconclusive and we need to go back to the drawing board."
This is also what funnel plots are for.
Being a parent gives you a pretty immediate answer to this question.
Some children are fine. Some children are not.
I have two children. My eldest (6) gets totally thoroughly addicted to video. As soon as he has a little bit, he just wants to watch more and more and more. My youngest one (4) will watch a little, get bored, play outside, maybe go back to it. This has always been true, ever since they were 1.
My eldest one will keep watching forgetting all about eating, peeing, or whatever. All those needs will literally jump at him at the same time, and he will routinely enter a major destructive tantrum when the video is stopped.
As a parent, I had to go for a video-free life. They are allowed very very little video on week ends, but that's it. Any more than that and my 6 year old will just. Go. Nuts. Asking for it every moment of the week.
I let them play VR (I have a Rift and a Vive), which has proven to be non-addictive (again, not scientific, just my experience with them). But, it'snot clear whether it's good or bad for the eyes...
I also contend that the phrase 'screen time' is poorly chosen. I prefer to differentiate between what she's doing with the screen. I count coding differently then watching Youtube vids, Minecraft different from reading a book on Overdrive, etc.
There's.a whole lot of nuance that tends to get lost. Also depends on the kid. Mine is fit and active (unlike her old man) so that feeds into it too.
Min
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
Let's see...
many people drown- bad
many people die without it- bad
used in pesticides- bad
floods cause billions of dollars damage- bad
great for bathing - good
great for boiling eggs - good
used in coffee- good
rain helps crops grow - good
Hmmmm. It's hard to say definitively whether water is good or bad.