Yes, Please to this article by Amy Orben and Andrew K. Przybylski, which I plan to pass around like I’m Oprah with cars. Titled The Association Between Adolescent Well-Being and Digital Technology Use, the paper does two of my favorite things: demonstrates the importance of theoretical precision & conceptual clarity in research design, and undermines moral panics about digital technology and mental health.
The effects of digital technologies on the mental lives of young people has been a topic of interdisciplinary concern and general popular worry. Such conversations are kept afloat by contradictory research findings in which digital technologies are alternately shown to enhance mental well-being, damage mental well-being, or to have little effect at all. Much (though not all) of this work comes from secondary analyses of large datasets, building on a broader scientific trend of big data analytics as an ostensibly superlative research tool. Orben and Przybylski base their own study on analysis of three exemplary datasets including over 350,000 cases. However, rather than simply address digital technology and mental well-being, the authors rigorously interrogate how existing datasets define key variables of interest, operationalize those variables, and model them with controls (i.e., other relevant factors). more...