Screen Media + Social Development

Sarah AdamsFall 2015

Screen Media is EVERYWHERE

Studies have shown that 73% of teens use social media

Also that 93% of all teens use the internet in general

Social Development Research Question: How can screen media use affect the development of social skills?

For this question, I addressed the positive and negative effects associated with screen media on social development

Positives of Screen Media

Improved Social Interaction practice

Emotional Recognition

Example: Viewing characters interacting with one another can be used to produce imitation

Positives cont.Example: Bogatz and Ball studied impact of Sesame Street and found positive influence on emotion recognition

Strengths: a pretest and post test to see effect

Weaknesses: questionable reliability of parent report of television viewing AND not generalizable because of Low SES participants

PositivesProsocial Behavior

Christakis et al. (2013): Compared violent media to prosocial media and showed that child behavior improved with prosocial tv viewing compared to violent tv viewing.

Strengths: same viewing time for both groups

Weakness: short term viewing, would benefit from longitudinal design

Negatives: Recognition of

EmotionsUhls et al. did a study and showed that children who were prevented from screen media improved recognition of nonverbal emotional cues.

Strength: good use of pre and post test to see effect

Weakness of the study: not fair comparison of environments

Uhls et al. Results

Graphs show the improvement between pre tests and pos tests

Control group: improved 1.79 questionsExperimental group: improved 4.76 questions

Negatives

Aggressive Behavior by imitating content

Study showed that children who watched Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers exhibited more violent behaviors than before they had viewed the show

Strength: shows pre and post effect

Weakness: only one trial, would benefit from long term study

Power Rangers

Example of violent content

Conclusion: Content is to blame

By looking at positive and negative effects of the screen media on social development, we see that the content of screen media plays a large role

Prosocial content can lead to positive social development while violent content can lead to negative impacts on social development.

Implications

Prosocial viewing content can have positive influences by viewing successful social interactions and mimicking

Violent content can have negative and can lead to anxiety and depression later in life.

These findings will lead to parents increasing prosocial screen media and limiting violent content media to assist social development

Future DirectionsFuture studies can conduct longitudinal studies on the effect viewing certain content can have on child social development

A pre and post test assessment and the incorporation of different content types will be necessary for comparison