Good news for Orange County’s contingent of gaming software companies, esports firms and smartphone app makers, not to mention concerned parents: there is “little evidence” to support the popular notion that tech time creates mental health problems for teenagers glued to their smartphones, a new report says.
A just-released study by University of California-Irvine psychological science professor Candice Odgers and three fellow researchers debunks the negative connotations of too much screen time.
“These findings stand in stark contrast with the popular narrative that smartphones are destroying young peoples’ lives and leading to increased mental health problems,” according to the study.
What’s more, the study also found that “engagement with the digital world can have real-world benefits’’ for youngsters.
“We were surprised by some of the positive associations that we found, that kids who were spending more time online communicating by text messaging, etc., were actually experiencing less depression and negative symptoms.” Odgers told the Business Journal on Sept. 3.
The researchers’ study was published last month in the journal Clinical Psychological Science. After preliminary research, it focused on the smartphone use of almost 400 adolescents between ages 10 and 15 in a target group in North Carolina.
Odgers said the “real causes” of adolescents’ mental problems may currently be overlooked as the “public conversation remains largely unchanged” regarding tech use.
“It may be time for adults to stop arguing over whether smartphones and social media are good or bad for teens’ mental health and start figuring out ways to best support them in both their offline and online lives,” she said.
No Risk
Odgers said the study is in line with other research that has failed to turn up a link between teens’ tech use and the causes of mental health problems.
“Adolescents at higher risk for mental health problems also exhibited no signs of increased risk for mental health problems on higher technology use days,” according to the study.
In addition to Odgers, the other researchers were Michaeline Jensen, assistant professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro; Madeleine George, postdoctoral researcher at Purdue University; and Michael Russell, assistant professor of behavioral health at Pennsylvania State University.
“Contrary to the common belief that smartphones and social media are damaging adolescents’ mental health, we don’t see much support for the idea that time spent on phones and online is associated with increased risk for mental health problems,” Jensen said in a statement released by UCI on Aug. 23.
Odgers and her colleagues surveyed more than 2,000 youth and then intensively tracked the subsample of nearly 400 teens on their smartphones multiple times a day for two weeks in 2016 and 2017.
Adolescents in the study “represented the economically and racially diverse population of youth attending North Carolina public schools,” according to UCI.
The researchers collected reports of mental health symptoms from the adolescents three times a day and they also reported on their daily technology usage each night.
Worrisome Stats?
Teens spend an average of a whopping 6.7 hours a day on screen media for non-school purposes, while pre-teens clock an average of 4.6 hours a day, the study cited earlier research as saying.
Those numbers often cause parents to worry.
Odgers acknowledges that adults say today’s youngsters “are not spending their time in the right way, they don’t know basic facts, they’re losing all of these skills.”
“The important thing to keep in mind is that every generation has done that,” according to her. “Adults don’t like the way kids spend their time.”
The reality, Odgers said, is that the current generation of young people has the highest high school graduation rate in history, with lower rates of violence, fewer criminal convictions, drinking and teen pregnancies.
