Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

2-2022

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Program

Educational Psychology

Advisor

Bruce Homer

Committee Members

David Rindskopf

Howard Everson

Subject Categories

Communication Technology and New Media | Psychology | Social Media

Keywords

digital media, screen media, screen time, mental health, depression, suicide

Abstract

Numerous studies, notably secondary analyses of survey data, have examined the possibility of adverse effects from teenagers' use of digital screen-based media--with correspondingly diverse findings. One research group in particular, led by Jean M. Twenge, has been prolific and forceful in associating adolescents’ screen time with reported increases in depression, suicidal ideation, and attempted suicide. Others have pointed to small effect sizes, construct validity issues, and other methodological problems in the Twenge research. However, one characteristic of the group's analyses of survey data, including data from the CDC's Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS), has remained unexplored: the use of metric methods to analyze dichotomous and ordinal data. By way of example, this study deployed binomial and ordinal regression to re-analyze data from seven administrations of YRBS between 2007 and 2019, a sample comprising 103,525 high-school students. The demonstration revealed that YRBS data provide no evidence of a relationship between non-television screen time and psychological well-being, except at an indeterminately high level of daily use, calling into question the widely publicized claims of the Twenge group.

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