Media use, face-to-face communication, media multitasking, and social well-being among 8- to 12-year-old girls.

Abstract

An online survey of 3,461 North American girls ages 8-12 conducted in the summer of 2010 through Discovery Girls magazine examined the relationships between social well-being and young girls' media use--including video, video games, music listening, reading/homework, e-mailing/posting on social media sites, texting/instant messaging, and talking on phones/video chatting--and face-to-face communication. This study introduced both a more granular measure of media multitasking and a new comparative measure of media use versus time spent in face-to-face communication. Regression analyses indicated that negative social well-being was positively associated with levels of uses of media that are centrally about interpersonal interaction (e.g., phone, online communication) as well as uses of media that are not (e.g., video, music, and reading). Video use was particularly strongly associated with negative social well-being indicators. Media multitasking was also associated with negative social indicators. Conversely, face-to-face communication was strongly associated with positive social well-being. Cell phone ownership and having a television or computer in one's room had little direct association with children's socioemotional well-being. We hypothesize possible causes for these relationships, call for research designs to address causality, and outline possible implications of such findings for the social well-being of younger adolescents.

Media multitasking is associated with distractibility and increased prefrontal activity in adolescents and young adults

“…Firstly, daily multitasking most likely consists not only of dual-tasking in the classical sense but of a combination of divided attention, task switching and performing several automatized functions in parallel (Carrier et al, 2015). In fact, the media multitasking questionnaire used in the present as well as previous studies (Ophir et al, 2009;Pea et al, 2012) might not really tap into genuine multitasking. For example, "texting while doing homework" most likely means intermittently pausing while studying to write a text message, and not actually doing these two…”

“…We used the shorter version of the media multitasking questionnaire (Ophir et al, 2009) adapted by Pea et al (2012) to create a media multitasking variable for each participant. The external validity of the resulting media multitasking questionnaire is yet to be firmly established, but several independent research groups have produced comparable indices for average media multitasking activity in their sample based on this questionnaire.…”

“…Ophir et al (2009) and Pea et al (2012) calculated a Media Multitasking Index (MMI), which was a measure of time spent multitasking in relation to the time spent using media in general. This means that a participant who uses little media but has a tendency to multitask while doing so gets a high MMI, whereas a participant who spends a lot of time using technology but only a small portion of it multitasking gets a low MMI, even though the absolute time spent media multitasking would be identical for these two participants.…”

“…The MMI was calculated for each participant by dividing the summed score for multitasking in each media category by the summed score of time spent using each media category, as described in Pea et al (2012).…”

Sustainable Digital Environments: What Major Challenges Is Humankind Facing?

“…There is empirical evidence that children between the ages of 8 and 12 years-a highly sensitive phase for identity formation, the development of social networks, and relationship building with peers who may serve as models and support-are negatively affected socio-emotionally by certain types of media use. A comprehensive study conducted with girls showed that high levels of media multitasking induce feelings of being less successful and not being normal, and reduced hours of sleep [12].…”