In the summer of 2010, an ad in Discovery Girls magazine invited readers to complete an online survey for a chance to win a free iPod. Stanford-based researcher Roy Pea wanted to explore how heavy media use might affect in-person face-to-face communication and potentially, peer friendships among young girls. Discovering the report as part of a graduate school assignment, Barbara Wyer was intrigued by the findings of Pea and his colleagues.
Q: What age group was targeted in Dr. Pea’s study?
Barbara Wyer: The magazine’s demographic was primarily made up of 8 to 12 year old North American girls.
Q: How many girls responded to the survey invitation?
Barbara Wyer: There were nearly 3500 respondents.
Barbara Wyer: The questions covered a broad range of topics. They explored attitudes and usage related to media multitasking, which the researchers defined as using two or more media devices at the same time; feelings of social well-being including acceptance or rejection by the girls’ peers, face-to-face relationships, average hours spent sleeping, and how many friends the girl believed her parents would describe as being a “bad influence” upon her.
Q: And they found…?
Barbara Wyer: Well, one of the most interesting things that the researchers discovered was that in-person interactions were consistently linked to “positive social feelings.” Conversely, in-person interaction was the variable most commonly omitted by respondents who reported the highest levels of media use. The researchers acknowledged that causality could not be conclusively determined but asserted their findings were “highly suggestive” of correlations between face-to-face communication and positive social adjustment and that corresponding conclusions might be inferred regarding negative influences of heavy media use.
Q: How could they be sure that the results weren’t skewed by heavy media users driving the results?
Barbara Wyer: The researchers did attempt to rule out that possibility and were “guardedly optimistic” that data was not influenced by income or geography biases. For instance, they sought to exclude duplicate responses by preventing responders from submitting a survey more than once from the same computer.
Q: What about if a girl had access to both a smartphone and a computer?
Barbara Wyer: Great point! Limiting multiple replies from one single computer would not necessarily have prevented a respondent from filling out a survey from multiple devices that did not share the same IP address.
So in my opinion it is reasonable to hypothesize that media-savvy girls might be more inclined to take the survey multiple times in order to increase their chances of winning an iPod. That could potential skew results in favor of media multi-tasking or heavy media use.
Q: Any other potentially problematic issues, in your opinion?
Barbara Wyer: There was no way to verify the gender or ages of respondents to the survey…
Q: Have other researchers studied this?
Barbara Wyer: When I originally searched for other published research regarding the impact of heavy media use and texting on adolescents [in October 2012] I found very little, other than a frequently cited paper by J. Alison Bryant and her colleagues was published in 2006. That’s virtually a lifetime ago in an age of exponentially changing technology.
Barbara Wyer: Regardless, it’s clear that the ubiquitous nature of digital media is informing a generation of adolescents like none other before.
Q: Do you have any concluding thoughts?
Barbara Wyer: I would be interested in knowing if the researchers followed up with parents to confirm the child’s age, gender, and computer/hand-held media device access. But even considering these points of caution, the research team should be applauded for examining how the media explosion has, and will continue to, change the social well-being and adjustment of the current generation of adolescents and those to come. Dr. Pea and his colleagues have made a valuable contribution to developmental psychology with this study.
Learn more: Pea, R. et. al. Media use, face-to-face communication, media multitasking, and social well-being among 8- to 12-year-old girls. Developmental Psychology, 48(2), March 2012, 327–336. doi: 10.1037/a0027030
