The association between adolescent well-being and digital technology use
Orben and Przybylski's paper is as much about method as about screens. Their argument is that the large social datasets used to study adolescents and technology contain so many variables that a researcher acting in good faith can arrive at almost any conclusion depending on which measures and controls they happen to choose, which is how the field produced a stream of confident and contradictory headlines. Their answer is specification curve analysis: run every defensible version of the analysis, thousands of them, and report the whole distribution of results rather than one. Applied across three large datasets covering more than three hundred thousand young people, the association between technology use and wellbeing comes out negative and very small, accounting for well under one per cent of the variation in how young people are doing. They put that size in context by noting that comparably sized associations attach to things nobody legislates about. Their conclusion is that the effect is too small to justify policy change, and the method is now widely borrowed.
Orben and Przybylski's paper is as much about method as about screens. Their argument is that the large social datasets used to study adolescents and technology contain so many variables that a researcher acting in good faith can arrive at almost any conclusion depending on which measures and controls they happen to choose, which is how the field produced a stream of confident and contradictory headlines. Their answer is specification curve analysis: run every defensible version of the analysis, thousands of them, and report the whole distribution of results rather than one. Applied across three large datasets covering more than three hundred thousand young people, the association between technology use and wellbeing comes out negative and very small, accounting for well under one per cent of the variation in how young people are doing. They put that size in context by noting that comparably sized associations attach to things nobody legislates about. Their conclusion is that the effect is too small to justify policy change, and the method is now widely borrowed.
Written from the abstract, Europe PMC.
What our sources record
Reproduced as it was written when this source was checked, figures and all.
3, 173-182. Specification curve analysis, n = 355,358.
Where we use it
- Both Sides of the Screen-Time Argument, Why We Look
Reliability of this reference
The link below was matched against the publisher's record on title, first author and year, and all three agree.
The source
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-018-0506-1
DOI: 10.1038/s41562-018-0506-1