Study finds screen time has minimal effect on mental health of teens

Where excessive screen time was linked to negative mental health in children, a new study finds that digital technology use has very minimal effect on mental health of teens.

After tracking data from over 350,000 subjects in the UK and US, researchers from University of Oxford have concluded that excessive screen time usage accounts for less than half a percent of a young person’s poor mental health.

Everything from wearing glasses to not getting enough sleep has greater negative mental health percentage as compared to digital screen use. The study made use of a method called Specification Curve Analysis (SCA) to dig through the data and find the results, as per New Atlas.

Excessive screen-time do not affect children’s sleep, new study finds

The method attempts to analyze the data using as many justifiable specifications as possible. After calculating as many variable as the data would permit, the researchers then compared the effects of digital technology use on well-being against different other factors.

Digital technology accounted for only 0.4% of a young person’s overall negative well-being. Marijuana use and binge-drinking had greatly larger negative effects. Whereas, bullying was found to have four times larger the negative effect on well-being than digital screen use, as per the study published in the journal Nature Human Behavior.

As a good point, factors like eating good breakfast and getting enough sleep were more relevant in affecting well-being than the effects of technology use. However, lead researcher Andrew Przybylski admitted than more research is needed to find specific and contextual consequences of digital technology use.

"Our findings demonstrate that screen use itself has at most a tiny association with youth mental health. The 0.4% contribution of screen use on young people’s mental health needs to be put in context for parents and policymakers.

“The nuanced picture provided by these results is in line with previous psychological and epidemiological research suggesting that the associations between digital screen-time and child outcomes are not as simple as many might think," Przybylski concluded.