Article analysis: screen time and attention in teenagers

Introduction

Many parents worry that time on phones and other screens harms teenagers’ attention. The researchers asked whether daily recreational screen time is related to performance on an attention task.

Participants

Twenty students (ages 13 to 15; 11 girls and 9 boys) from two junior high schools (grades 7 to 9) in one suburban school district in Canada took part. Parents signed consent forms and each student agreed to take part after the study was explained. Students were told they could stop at any time. Each student’s results were stored under a code number rather than a name.

Method

For one week, each student’s phone and computer recorded their recreational screen time (games, video and social media, not schoolwork); the researchers used each student’s average hours per day. At the end of the week, each student completed a 10-minute computer attention task: letters flashed on the screen one at a time, and the student pressed a key only when an X appeared. Attention was the number of the 30 X’s that the student correctly responded to.

Results

Students with more daily screen time tended to respond correctly to fewer X’s ($r = -.52$; see the scatterplot).

Discussion

The researchers noted that they did not measure sleep, family rules about screens or students’ interest in the task. Larger real studies of teenagers usually find weaker relationships between screen time and attention than this one.

Invented study for practice.