CMO report is unable to shed light on impact of screen time and social media on children’s health

Abstract

The government wants formal guidance for health professionals and parents on the impact on screen time and social media on children’s health. But a new report from the UK’s four Chief Medical Officers says more robust evidence is needed, reports Nigel Hawkes

There is no evidence that associations between adolescents’ digital technology engagement and mental health problems have increased

“…That is, the observed associations are typically based on between-persons correlations, which make determining causality and directionality difficult, and are susceptible to the influence of confounding observed or unobserved variables (Ophir et al, 2020). Literature reviews by academic, medical, and policy collaborations have highlighted both the lowquality evidence in this space and the need for a longitudinal perspective (Appel et al, 2020;Hawkes, 2019;Viner et al, 2019). In secondary data analyses, these problems are compounded by a general lack of adherence to consistent standards (Weston et al, 2019), which threatens the validity and robustness of reported associations, as the many choices leading to a reported analysis can engender misrepresentative estimates (Orben & Przybylski, 2019a).…”

Only Holistic and Iterative Change Will Fix Digital Technology Research

“…This change will be difficult to manage, however not having such a research ecosystem in place is already causing harm on a daily basis. Research is slow and seems years behind the technological development it is supposed to keep in check; public conversation is misled by research routinely failing to emphasize the diversity of technology use; policy is slow and does not have the necessary evidence to give much needed advice (Hawkes, 2019); and such a vacuum of evidence is opening the space for misleading evidence and moral entrepreneurs. An improved research ecosystem will therefore not only generate reliable insights that span disciplines, but will also allow psychological research to create a workflow that can inform society about newly emergent technologies with an agility and speed that can keep up with an accelerating industry.…”

Digital diet: A 21st century approach to understanding digital technologies and development

“…While it has been possible to create guidelines about how many "units" of alcohol one should drink, establishing evidence-based guidelines about how many minutes of social media a child should use is much more difficult (e.g. see Hawkes, 2019). Time spent on digital devices does not act like a chemical compound which, when ingested, leads to quantifiable changes in the body that are relatively uniform across populations.…”