Skip to main content

Advertisement

Log in

Reply to: Underestimating digital media harm

  • Matters Arising
  • Published:

From Nature Human Behaviour

View current issue Submit your manuscript

The Original Article was published on 17 April 2020

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Fig. 1: SCA of the Millennium Cohort Study showing associations between prespecified well-being subscales and digital technology use for males and females.

Data availability

The data that support the findings of this reply are available from Monitoring the Future (MTF) and the UK data service (MCS), but restrictions apply to the availability of these data, which were used under license for the current study and are therefore not publicly available. However, data are available from the relevant third-party repository after agreement to their terms of usage. Information about data collection and questionnaires is available on the OSF at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/7XHA2. For brevity, we have not included all of the sample size measurements in this manuscript, but they are available in the data files on the OSF.

Code availability

The code used to analyse the relevant data are available on the Open Science Framework at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/BYQM5.

References

  1. Twenge, J. M. Underestimating digital media harm. Reply to: Adolescent technology and well-being. Nat. Hum. Behav. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-020-0839-4 (2020).

  2. Orben, A. & Przybylski, A. K. The association between adolescent well-being and digital technology use. Nat. Hum. Behav. 3, 173–182 (2019).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Simonsohn, U., Simmons, J. P. & Nelson, L. D. Specification curve: descriptive and inferential statistics on all reasonable specifications. SSRN Elect. J. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2694998 (2019).

  4. Silberzahn, R. et al. Many analysts, one data set: making transparent how variations in analytic choices affect results. Adv. Methods Pract. Psychol. Sci. 1, 337–356 (2018).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Kelly, Y., Zilanawala, A., Booker, C. & Sacker, A. Social media use and adolescent mental health: findings from the UK Millennium Cohort Study. EClinicalMedicine 6, 59–68 (2019).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Twenge, J. M., Joiner, T. E., Rogers, M. L. & Martin, G. N. Increases in depressive symptoms, suicide-related outcomes, and suicide rates among U.S. adolescents after 2010 and links to increased new media screen time. Clin. Psychol. Sci. 6, 3–17 (2017).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Orben, A., Dienlin, T. & Przybylski, A. K. Social media’s enduring effect on adolescent life satisfaction. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 116, 10226–10228 (2019).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  8. Przybylski, A. K. & Weinstein, N. A large-scale test of the goldilocks hypothesis. Psychol. Sci. 28, 204–215 (2017).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Altman, D. G. & Royston, P. The cost of dichotomising continuous variables. BMJ 332, 1080 (2006).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Orben, A. & Przybylski, A. K. Screens, teens, and psychological well-being: evidence from three time-use-diary studies. Psychol. Sci. 30, 682–696 (2019).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. Orben, A. Teens, Screens and Well-Being: An Improved Approach. PhD thesis, Oxford University (2019).

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Contributions

A.O. and A.K.P. are authors of the original paper. A.O. and A.K.P. conceptualised and wrote the reply; A.O. conceptualised and ran the analyses.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Amy Orben.

Ethics declarations

Competing interests

A.O. and A.K.P. have no competing financial interests; in the last five years, A.K.P. has served in an unpaid advisory capacity with the OECD, UNICEF, Facebook Inc., Google Inc. and the ParentZone. A.O. and A.K.P. have been called as expert witnesses for a variety of UK governmental bodies and departments including Parliamentary Select Committees.

Additional information

Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Extended data

Extended Data Fig. 1 Comparing digital technology use correlation with well-being measures to listening to music with well-being measures in the MTF dataset.

Plots of the variables listening to music and mean digital technology use against the mean of all well-being measures in the survey. The small points are individual participants, while the lines are mean values.

Supplementary information

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Orben, A., Przybylski, A.K. Reply to: Underestimating digital media harm. Nat Hum Behav 4, 349–351 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-020-0840-y

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-020-0840-y

  • Springer Nature Limited

This article is cited by

Navigation