Is Screen Time Good or Bad? It's Not That Simple

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.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.