title: Media use, face-to-face communication, media multitasking, and social well-being among 8- to 12-year-old girls.
abstract: An online survey of 3,461 North American girls ages 8-12 conducted in the summer of 2010 through Discovery Girls magazine examined the relationships between social well-being and young girls' media use--including video, video games, music listening, reading/homework, e-mailing/posting on social media sites, texting/instant messaging, and talking on phones/video chatting--and face-to-face communication. This study introduced both a more granular measure of media multitasking and a new comparative measure of media use versus time spent in face-to-face communication. Regression analyses indicated that negative social well-being was positively associated with levels of uses of media that are centrally about interpersonal interaction (e.g., phone, online communication) as well as uses of media that are not (e.g., video, music, and reading). Video use was particularly strongly associated with negative social well-being indicators. Media multitasking was also associated with negative social indicators. Conversely, face-to-face communication was strongly associated with positive social well-being. Cell phone ownership and having a television or computer in one's room had little direct association with children's socioemotional well-being. We hypothesize possible causes for these relationships, call for research designs to address causality, and outline possible implications of such findings for the social well-being of younger adolescents.
authors.affiliation: School of Education, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA. roypea@stanford.edu
authors.forename: Roy
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Pea
authors.forename: Clifford
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Nass
authors.forename: Lyn
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Meheula
authors.forename: Marcus
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Rance
authors.forename: Aman
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Kumar
authors.forename: Holden
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Bamford
authors.forename: Matthew
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Nass
authors.forename: Aneesh
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Simha
authors.forename: Benjamin
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Stillerman
authors.forename: Steven
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Yang
authors.forename: Michael
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Zhou
mesh_terms: D002648:Child; D002652:Child Behavior / Q000523:psychology*; D003142:Communication; D034742:Electronic Mail; D004644:Emotions; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D011237:Predictive Value of Tests; D012044:Regression Analysis; D012737:Sex Factors; D012890:Sleep; D061108:Social Media; D014741:Video Recording