NY Times Misreads Scientific Study – Again

It has become commonplace to read articles in places like the New York Times that are simply summaries of scholarly articles picked up from what are, in effect, trade journals. They are often not very good summaries.

On January 17, 2020, The Times published an article by Nathaniel Popper, in which the author of the article completely misinterprets the main conclusion of an article in The Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry.

The title of the article, “Panicking About Your Kids’ Phones? New Research Says Don’t,” says all that needs to be said about the article, which purports to refute recent concerns about the amount of time that children and young adults spend on their mobile devices, because the headline says the exact opposite of what the original paper said.

This “scientific” study contradicts the collected wisdom of many scholars, including philosophers, psychologists, psychiatrists, sociologists and other astute observers, to the effect that we are becoming an alienated culture because of our increasing reliance on linked devices for the majority of our social interactions. This trend toward alienation is obvious across the spectrum of age groups, but it begins at the point where children are introduced to linked devices and, hence, the breakdown in the social fabric of modern civilization.

However, the conclusions drawn from the Times headline isn’t at all what the abstract of the article actually states, which was that “…most research to date has been correlational, focused on adults versus adolescents, and has generated a mix of often conflicting small positive, negative and null associations.”

In other words, the research is inconclusive. The abstract goes on to state that, “The most recent and rigorous large‐scale preregistered studies report small associations between the amount of daily digital technology usage and adolescents’ well‐being that do not offer a way of distinguishing cause from effect and, as estimated, are unlikely to be of clinical or practical significance.”

When deconstructed, what this sentence is actually saying, whether or not the authors intended it to say what it appears be saying, is that the most recent studies of the effects of linked devices on adolescents do not offer a way of distinguishing between cause and effect. In other words, the studies that were reviewed by the paper’s authors, Candice L. Odgers and Michaeline R. Jenson, were not useful to anyone who wants to know exactly what the results of increased smart phone usage might be.

What Odgers and Jenson were really reporting is that there isn’t sufficient “scientific” evidence to either prove or disprove that increased smart phone usage adversely affects children and teenagers.

The inability to accurately report the findings summarized in scientific papers is an increasing issue in mass media, where everyone is an expert. Even those reporters who have advanced degrees in the subjects they are reporting on do not have the necessary, stringent academic background to evaluate many of the papers they are writing about. This goes hand in hand with the widely reported phenomenon that an increasing percentage of the “scientific” papers being reported upon are of questionable veracity and are often downright frauds.

On this particular subject, the only way to determine whether increased smart phone usage adversely affects the intellectual and social development of children and teenagers would be to study a cohort of  ADULTS who were exposed to unrestricted smart phone usage as children and teenagers against a cohort of demographically matched participants of the same age who were not exposed to smart phone usage during their developmental years.

The first smart phones went on sale in 1992,  when IBM released the Simon Personal Communicator, but it was not widely adopted because there were very few applications available for the hand held unit. (I had one and it really sucked.)

It wasn’t until the first Apple iPhone hit the market in 2007, followed by the first Android phone, The T-Mobile G1 in 2008, that mobile applications began to appear, making the phones into the phenomenon they have become.  Without those applications, Samsungs and Apples are simply overpriced cell phones.

Therefore, the oldest children who were exposed to the smart phone phenomenon from birth were born in 2008, which means they are now 12 years old. Of course, no one ever gave an Android or an iPhone to a newborn infant, so that we can assume that the youngest people to have been exposed to smart phones were probably around 12 years of age, making those kids around 24 years of age right now. The current age at which children get smart phones today is around 10.3 years of age, according to an undated article in Inc. , but this article reports that Bill Gates didn’t give his own kids their own smart phones until they were 14 years old.

Now that we know the age range, we need to come up with a control group  of young men and women of around 24 years of age who did not start using smart phones until they were at least 18 years of age or, better yet, have never used them at all.

Where in the world would you find that control group?  Among the traditional “Old Order” Amish communities in Pennsylvania?  Admirable people, but not quite the control group you need for this kind of study, since they abjure almost all of the devices that we “English” (what the Amish people call non-Amish people) use on an everyday basis.

Since rigorous scientific methodologies might not hold the answer to this question, we might have to fall back on the anecdotal evidence of our own experiences.

I occasionally take the Tri-Rail from Delray Beach, Florida, to Deerfield Beach to meet up with my partner for dinner. It just  so happens that the particular train I usually catch appears  to the be one that kids traveling home from high schools up in the Palm Beach area also take.

On these occasions, I have seen dozens of high schoolers exiting from the train, holding their cell phones up to their faces as they walk, and often texting at the same time. No one ever speaks to anyone else even though they are obviously coming home from the same schools and therefore probably know each other.

One high school senior explained it to me this way. “Sometimes, you want to talk to a friend about someone else who is sitting right next to you, so we text each other to say things we wouldn’t want them to hear.”

I think that sums up the problem rather nicely, refuting any so-called but obviously questionable “scientific” evidence that early smart phone usage doesn’t have an adverse effect on the development of social skills. It’s bad enough when kids talk about each other behind each other’s backs. It really is ten times worse when they do it right in front of the kids they are holding up to ridicule.