TV is the Devil

[Jenne]

And I'll go off in a different direction here as well--the powers that be are looking into integrating more and more web-based teaching.  They feel that students RELATE better to material that they can download and manipulate, so they are offering an avenue of teaching that closely resembles how students choose to spend their free time.  This not only gives the students that don't have them web-based skills to move into the future, but also gives those students who DO have the skills a better chance at classroom "survival."  (This all has negative AND positive ramifications, of course.)

So, is this going to "psychologically damage" the students?  This is definitely increased "screen time."  Is this not what the study proposes children cut back on? 

You see the mixed message here?  We are trending toward a society that simultaneously loathes and feeds that which it's changing into.  The midpoint will probably be passed over for a breaking point, somewhere along the line.  So this particular pendulum swing in the study is juxtaposed to the pendulum swing that is moving "forward" or progressing towards "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em."

[Cramulus]

...and here's the data on the survey they used, called The Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ)

http://www.sdqinfo.org/a0.html

basically, it broadly evaluates the degree of:

1) emotional symptoms
2) conduct problems
3) hyperactivity/inattention   
4) peer relationship problems   
5) prosocial behaviour


it's used for clinical assessment -- meaning that if you take your kids to a psychiatrist to have them evaluated for any number of psychological issues, this may be the survey they take.

The SDQ has a number of papers written about it. From my scanning of abstracts, it looks fairly reliable. By that I mean its results are highly correlated with other surveys which look for psychological issues in children.

[Jenne]

It's probably the same survey my husband uses.  BUT, you can't use it to make a diagnosis by itself.  You have to interview and observe, and gather reports. 

It's an interesting concept, though...I just think it's more of an indicator of possible issues rather than concrete proof of them.

[Cramulus]

They're not making a diagnosis though, they're looking for broad indicators. And no psychologist is going to claim concrete proof of causality, all psych studies do is examine corollaries.



So in layman's terms... they collected a lot of data about these kids. They measured the distance that the kid moved over a period of time, how many hours that the kid watched a screen, and their results on the SDQ, which measures things like emotional, conduct, attention, and peer relation issues. And they compared all of these things to tease out how they are connected.

There were two main findings they learned from their sample of 1013 kids
-high screen time means a higher score on the SDQ
-low physical activity means a higher score on the SDQ

Higher amounts of physical activity do not cancel out the effects of high screen time.

There was something I got from the abstract which I didn't see in any of the articles about it... but they did differentiate between TV and Computer time. And that it looks like TV is slightly more related than computers to your SDQ score. And also that low amounts of physical activity are more related to SDQ score than high amounts of television.


Possible Confounds:

A survey of 1013 kids is a pretty large sample size, but they are all from one region, Bristol. If you think 8-13 year old kids from the UK are significantly different from kids in your region, your mileage may vary.

Socioeconomic status still sticks out in my mind, but I might be confusing the SDQ results with academic achievement. I know that socioeconomic status is correlated with achievement, but I don't know if it's correlated with emotional problems, conduct problems, attention problems, etc.

[Cain]

It also depends where in Bristol they are from.  St Pauls, for example, is an economically deprived area with lots of drug use and other behaviour which could also help raise the score on the SDQ.

[Jenne]

@Cram: Yes, all of what you said I can agree with--but my point is that this study is never meant (or shouldn't anyway) to be an indicator that all parents who allow their kids 2+ hours/day of screen time are lousy and will have fucked up kids.

But it's being advertised that way.

Data like this should not be taken into the layperson's world and analyzed outside of anything other than another indicator that you need to make sure you know wtf your kids are doing.  

[Cramulus]

Yeah -- I think this is an issue of bad science reporting, not bad research.

Their conclusion is pretty straightforward:

Both television viewing and computer use are important independent targets for intervention for optimal well-being for children, irrespective of levels of [activity] or overall sedentary time.

ie:


High degrees of physical activity do not shield your child from the negative effects of television/computers.

[Jenne]

...but this is what happens with this type of research...all the time.

And like I said--the trend in "progressive" (and that can be taken however you will!) education research seems to be moving more TOWARD more "screen time" not away from it.

It just reminds me of the class size reduction stuff of the 90's.

[tyrannosaurus vex]

Again I'd like to stress that content should be a major consideration, and so should parental involvement. I expect most of these "adverse effects" take place in kids who are just plopped down in front of a screen and ignored or left entirely to their own devices - and the same adverse effects probably occur among kids who are left without adequate guidance and supervision in any activity (or lack thereof). The key in my own experience is developing a relationship with your child where you are the mentor and he/she is the pupil, fostering creativity and curiosity, and using whatever media (tv/web/games/books/etc) to whatever extent as a tool in a larger activity, not as the direct object of the activity.

It may not be the case, but it seems like the wording of this study indicates the people conducting the study leave "computer use" and "television viewing" at that, as if three hours watching brainless funnies on YouTube is the equivalent of three hours watching something educational and thought-provoking, as if there is some magical radiation emanating from these devices that results in stupidity and developmental problems universally across all content and uses, which I don't accept.

[Cramulus]

content is definitely a good topic for a follow up study.

My hypothesis is that interactive media (like forums and social networking sites) are more mentally engaging than passive entertainment (like youtube and hulu). But I haven't seen any research which differentiates between the two. I guess it gets fuzzy though because you can use forums/facebook passively, only reading and not interacting.

and games too - I'd love to see them distinguish between game playing and other forms of internet use. When I was 13 I was playing D&D by e-mail and had a number of pen pals. By the time I was 15 I was learning QBASIC and surfing on dial-up BBSs. I don't think people do that so much anymore, but my brain sure was getting a work out!

[Requia ☣]

Not Khara, but:  ...I guess my problem is the diagnostics combined with the fact that they may have selected a group of kids with "other" factors that weighed into what the results showed.  They used a questionnaire that showed "psychological problems"--ooook...I know I sure as shit wouldn't trust just a 25-question survey to tell me if my kid was cuckoo.

It's just all too easy to take a study like this, done for someone's grad thesis, and turn it into alarmist stuff that gets spread everywhere.  The trend is a no-brainer, but this will be used as filler against parents who DO give a shit.  I know I'm parsing this thing to death, but I see a LOT of this type of thing in PTA.  It bugs me.

You have to consider what the questionnaire does.  For one kid saying 'the results here means he has a 10% chance of having x' is pretty useless.  When you apply it to a thousand kids, you get more useful results.  Sort of an opposite of statistics mean nothing to the individual.


Cram, how the heck do I interpret those numbers, I've never seen a confidence interval before.