Technology's Child by Katie Davis;

Author:Katie Davis; [Davis, Katie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MIT Press

But Are the Kids All Right?

I’ve already mentioned the rising rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide among teens in recent years,81 as well as connections between online social comparison and negative mental health outcomes.82 How worried should we be when it comes to teen well-being and social media, and who, exactly, should we be worried about?

Similar to debates about children’s television viewing (chapter 2) and video game playing (chapter 4), it’s not hard to find evidence for positive, negative, and neutral effects of social media on adolescent well-being.83 In the aggregate, and using population level data, the effects of technology on adolescents’ mental health and well-being whether positive or negative appear to be pretty small.84

But recall my observation in the introduction that this type of data, though useful for identifying general trends, isn’t helpful in providing insight into the experiences of individual youth. When it comes to teens and well-being, we might look at the small effects identified in large-scale studies and conclude that technology isn’t having such a big impact, good or bad, on teens’ well-being. And while that may be true on an aggregate level, it might be overlooking important individual dynamics and variations.

When researchers look more closely at aggregate-level data, such as differences across ages, they start to see some interesting patterns. Researcher Amy Orben and colleagues identified two periods of adolescence when teens’ social media use corresponds to lower well-being—the first around puberty (ages eleven to thirteen for girls and ages fourteen to fifteen for boys) and the second around age nineteen.85 The increased specificity that studies like this provide are useful; for instance, they suggest periods when teens might benefit from delaying their social media use (early adolescence) and ages when teens may need some added community support (late adolescence). Still, such population-level studies don’t tell us much about the experiences that individual teens are having with social media.

Fortunately, there’s a growing appreciation among researchers for the value of focusing on person-specific as well as aggregate-level dynamics involving teens, technology, and well-being.86 One method that researchers are turning to increasingly is called experience sampling, which involves collecting real-time data from individual teens—in the form of quick surveys sent directly to their phones, or passive collection of data (e.g., heartrate, steps taken) from wearable devices—as they go about their daily lives. One of the benefits of experience sampling is its ability to generate a lot of data for a single person over time, allowing researchers to get specific about how technology use and well-being change and relate to each other over time for individual teens.

For instance, in one study using experience sampling, researchers Ine Beyens, Patti Valkenburg, and their colleagues at Project AWeSome (Adolescents, Wellbeing, and Social media) surveyed a group of teens six times per day for a week to examine connections between individual teens’ social media use and their subjective well-being. Forty-two surveys each for sixty-three teens, minus a few missed surveys, produced 2,155 individual assessments—that’s a lot of data for a relatively

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.