Pre-Conference White Papers (embargoed pending peer review and publication) suggest the elements of a new, prioritized, national research agenda.  To further develop those recommendations in the context of the Conference program, attendees were assigned to specific work groups.  Each work group remained together after lunch to generate a four-minute summary of the state of the field about which it had conferred.  Each work group member nominated three research priorities, and then his or her entire group selected five (more or less) to present to the entire Conference community.  Those reports are summarized below.

Early Childhood, Family and Parenting

Work Group Leader: Ellen Wartella, Ph.D.

Young children’s usage of digital media is increasing rapidly. That’s true even among low-socioeconomic-status families and in organized childcare settings. Child-directed marketing through novel technologies is increasing, too. With respect to the digital media being produced specifically for young children, many of the commercially available “educational” apps are unlike the highly controlled ones that labs are using to understand the underpinnings of what children can imitate or learn (in terms of verbal or visuospatial tasks).

These considerations provide the context for this group’s research recommendations.  Most of these recommendations concern giving children developmentally appropriate media, which cannot be done until there is a broad understanding of what “developmentally appropriate” means in this context.

Proposed Research Priorities:

• Conduct research to determine how digital play displaces or effects “real play” and parent/child interactions, and more completely document its health outcomes (including obesity, cardiovascular risk, and developmental and behavioral outcomes).
• Use new research technologies (LENA, app trackers, video monitoring, etc.) to determine what children are being exposed to through new media technologies, how frequently, through how many devices, in what social contexts, etc. Many of these new investigative technologies have yet to be standardized and refined, so they should be piloted, tested, and standardized use in both longitudinal and experimental studies.  This will require partnerships with informatics experts, engineers, and developers, who have the capacity to crunch the “big data” that the new research technologies generate.
• Employ the new tools in longitudinal studies, starting prenatally or from birth, to understand what specific characteristics make children differentially susceptible to the potentially adverse effects of media. Study the transactions between child characteristics (such as self-regulation, prematurity, substance exposure in utero, maternal stress, and other contextual influences that might mediate or moderate the impact of digital media on child development).
• Determine how use neurophysiologic measures and correlates in experimental practices.
• Translate experimental studies into education for families, and frame that education in a way that meets parents where they are – that isn’t “top down, talking head-type media” – and actually engages them through technological tools.
• Conduct research in a way that takes into account the family context for media use in early childhood. In that context, conduct research to identify best practices for parental mediation in a constantly changing media environment. Pursue better understanding of how parents’ media use behaviors (for example, while breastfeeding or at the playground) impact their children’s media usage and related outcomes.
• Study how developmental processes and individual child characteristics influence the intersection between media and family life.

Digital and Media Literacies (Reading)

Work Group Leader: Justine Cassell, Ph.D.

The thinking behind this group’s choice to rename itself provides important context for its research priorities. The field of media literacy has a history and a wealth of research (particularly with respect to interventions).  In contrast, digital literacy is a relatively new field, and even its name is not uniformly understood and defined. This creates a nomenclature problem.

Digital literacy has developed out of the broader field of literacy studies (that is, what it means to read and write).  Reading and writing on screens is a different way of thinking and being than doing the same things in print.   In this context, this working group defined its scope as the investigation of “issues related to the responsible and critical creation and consumption of texts in all forms.” This includes skills of accessing, evaluating, analyzing, and participating.

Reading and writing digitally differ from the same activities in printed texts.  Digital texts are inherently multimodal. That is, they have images, sound, video, and hyperlinks.  The multiple modes work together to create meaning.  Readers and writers of digital texts need to understand how different multimodal formats work together.  Print skills are not necessarily transferring to digital reading and writing.  Schools are principally teaching print, rather than digital, literacy skills, and print literacy are not necessarily transferring to digital literacy activities.  This calls into question the research being done on comparisons between reading digital and print texts, because children are not yet being taught how to read on a screen.

Information used to be scarce, but now it’s plentiful.  The abilities to access, create, contribute information have been democratized.  Despite these facts, schools continue to value information as if it were scarce.  In contrast, adult guidance was once plentiful, but is now scarce.  This is leaving children to access abundant information without adult guidance.

This raises questions about process skills that are fundamental to participation in society.  We don’t know how to measure digital literacy.  Despite this fact, this group believes that digital media literacies can be part of the prevention of harms.

Proposed Research Priorities:

• Determine what educational interventions, in formal learning environments like schools, can support positive outcomes related to the health and behavior issues discussed at the conference (sleep, obesity, violence, etc.).
• In the context of the so-called “opportunity gap” or “achievement gap”, identify those intervention design features that best address the factors contributing to the “digital divide” and the development of literacies.
• Investigate, identify, and test the competencies involved in becoming digital and media literate at a global (rather than disciplinary) level.  Define the base level that all citizens need to achieve.

Media Multitasking

Work Group Leader: Melina Uncapher, Ph.D.

Research has established that media multitasking (“MMT”) is associated with particular cognitive, psychosocial, and neurological characteristics in research subjects.  Associated cognitive difference include: decreased filtering of internal and external information, allocation of top-down attention to task goals, and sustained attention; and increased self-reporting of attention lapses, mind-wandering, and multisensory integration.  (The last of these is as potential benefit of MMT, too.)  Psychosocial differences associated with MMT include increased impulsivity and depression, and decreased self-control.  One study has identified neurological differences, too.  These include less gray matter in the frontal component of the default mode network, and less within-network resting-state connectivity.
A number of key open questions remain with respect to MMT.  One is causality.  It has yet to be determined if MMT changes the brain and behavior, or alternatively, if people predisposed to attentional differences are more inclined MMT.  Regarding cognition and the brain, the neurocognitive and behavioral profile associated with MMT remain to be fully identified.  Questions also persist regarding age effects (for example, whether younger populations are more vulnerable to the adverse effects of MMT, and whether there is a period of acute susceptibility during which MMT should be avoided entirely).   More broadly, we do not yet know how MMT differs from other kinds of multitasking, and whether particular categories of MMT behavior have different sets of effects.  We have not identified specific, effective interventions, or even key parameters for different populations (for example, to reflect differences with respect to age of onset, dosage, type, and ability).  Finally, we don’t yet know whether the self-reporting study methods used in the past are the best way to assess MMT.

Proposed Research Priorities:

• In broad terms, pursue an integrative, synergistic research agenda, each component of which will be pursued independently, but with the ultimate goal of integrating them.
• Pursue better metrics of MMT, sensation-seeking, and impulsivity, which can be used across disciplines by everyone looking at these issues (with a focus on individual differences and driving factors).
• Use that standardized tool kit (for measuring high, medium, and low MMT) to create a shared library of skills relevant to this research, to sharpen the definition of MMT and the dependent measures that lead to it, and to facilitate the selection and administration of a common core of relevant cognitive tasks and neural behavioral, and learning measurements.
• Look at mind, brain, and cognition.  In terms of the management of this complex research enterprise, borrow the USAF’s “Space Fortress Model”.  Convene people from different labs, with different methodologies, to focus on a common question in a common format.
• Integrate what’s age appropriate (identifying what is good and useful to measure at different developmental stages).  Define a developmental trajectory, including critical windows of sensitivity, and identify the bidirectional influences of MMT, taking into account the influence of individual differences.
• Make “best guesses” as to useful prescriptive methods for mitigating the negative consequences of excessive MMT (such as in texting and driving).
• Bring all these elements of the research agenda into a comprehensive theory of what’s going on; that is, develop the cognitive neuroscience of media multitasking at the level of models and mechanisms.  Derive integrative, mechanistic models that drive hypothesis testing and make prescriptive policy possible.

Advertising and Marketing

Work Group Leader: Matthew Lapierre, Ph.D.

Advertising and marketing influence important youth behaviors related to health and wellbeing (including diet, alcohol and tobacco use, vaping, etc.).  Kids are using mobile media at an increased rate (nearly half of teens’ screen time is now consumed through mobile devices).  Their media diet includes apps, social media, games, and other new formats.  Marketers are investing heavily in advertising to youth, on mobile media and in other non-traditional ways (including product placement within games, geotargeting, and celebrity posts to encourage imitative behaviors).  We don’t yet know how much of such advertising and marketing messages kids are exposed to today.   We do have forty years of research on advertising and marketing to youth audiences through static media (TV and radio), but the media landscape today is dramatically different from that one.

Proposed Research Priorities:

• Conduct a large-scale, interdisciplinary study quantifying and tracking youth media exposure to both healthy and unhealthy marketing messages in mobile and non-traditional media (including through social marketing, games and apps, YouTube and other viral video media, product placement, and personalized marketing).  Compile an inventory of the techniques being employed to reach and influence the youth audience, with an eye toward the policy implications of such practices (fairness of viral marketing to kids, manipulative game design, etc.)  This will require new research methodologies, and collaboration with computer scientists and other kinds of experts.
• Investigate how youths process the marketing and advertising messages that they get through mobile and non-traditional media.    Look particularly at the link between their understanding of persuasive intent – that is, whether they know that media are being used to influence their behavior – and their protection against those media messages.  Identify the developmental factors (such as executive function and emotional regulation) and ecological factors that may moderate media effects.
• Taking account what we know about children’s exposure to, and processing of, advertising messages, research how can we enhance their receptivity to healthy messaging and reinforce their protection again unhealthy messages.

Influence of Sex in the Media on Kids

Work Group Leader: Rebecca L. Collins, Ph.D.

Children exposed earlier, and more, to sexual portrayals are more likely to have sex sooner, to have risky sex, to get pregnant, and to contract sexually transmitted diseases.  Attitudes and beliefs about sexuality also are known to be influenced by media exposure, but going beyond that general statement will require new research.

Proposed Research Priorities:

• The data needed to interpret those known effects are old and stale. “Joint, collaborative content analysis” is needed – a repository of media that’s been sampled, representatively, from all media.  Gather data to be administered as communal core knowledge for the research community; that is, to be made generally available to specialized groups, each of which can analyze it through the lens of its specific content expertise (for example, sex, aggression, obesity and advertising group, etc.).  This process will generate necessary publishable analyses that could, in turn, be added to the core of communal information resources. In this way, all disciplines will have the data needed to conduct, and continuously refresh, relevant media effects studies.  To some extent, this is a call to replace some of the data previously generated by the Kaiser Family Foundation.
• Obtaining the requisite raw data in an ongoing and specific way will require innovative research methods.  Develop and widely deploy new “media technology tracking devices”, such as those used by Michael Rich at Harvard, for research purposes.
• Create a new Media Effects Studies Section at the National Institutes of Health.  Work in this field currently is spread across different study sections.  Rarely do people reviewing funding proposals have the necessary media effects studies expertise to evaluate those proposals properly.  This impairs researchers’ ability to obtain funding.
• Launch a national longitudinal study of sexual media effects moderators.  All major studies to date have found subgroups unaffected by their exposure to sexual media content.  Follow-up is needed to determine what factors contributed to those study subjects’ relative resilience, and whether that knowledge can be used to protect other populations.
• Perform research on the use, content, and effects of sexual media on social networking sites.  Such studies would build on Megan Moreno’s work.  They should be longitudinal, and provide more detailed data and different kinds of samples than past efforts.
• Publish an IOM report, with long versions of the conference White Papers, to catalyze policy makers and researchers (as “Food Marketing and Children” did in that arena).
• Create deep engagement between the research community and TV executives and producers, to enroll them in data collection efforts, to gain access to the data collected by that content industry (and, presumably others), and to promote the portrayal of healthy sexual behaviors in the media to which children are directly and indirectly exposed.

Media Violence

Work Group Leader: Craig Anderson, Ph.D.

Proposed Research Priorities:

• Who Is Affected Most, and Why?  That will involve moving away from general questions about “whether there’s an effect”, and moving toward the question of who’s most at risk.  It’s time to begin categorizing younger people into a better model.  Doing so will require that we really talk about developmental susceptibilities, get away from demographics, and refocus on more particularized risk factors (such as family variables).
• 

  Craig Anderson, Ph.D.

  Impact of Desensitization.  The current emphasis on aggression has generated substantial data, but we have relatively little data on desensitization (on individuals and society), which could be a more prevalent effect.  There are potential impacts on pro-social behavior, on how the legal system evaluates violence, and on attitudes toward gun control and similar public safety issues.

• How Much is Too Much?  We still lack “dosage” information for parents when it comes to media violence.
• Interventions.  There’s been insufficient research on interventions (in schools, in families, peer interventions, for different ages/stages).
• Monitoring.  We need ongoing monitoring of media violence. The National Television Violence Study remains the principle source.  It’s time for a new, comprehensive framework for assessing how much violence is in each platform, and what kind of violence is where (in terms of risk factors).

 

 

 

“[W]e really need to do a better job, because how can we study the effects if we don’t really know what the content is and how it’s changing over time?”

Social Media

Work Group Leader: Yalda Uhls, PhD

The group framed its research priorities by specifically defining “social media” as “computer-mediated tools that allow people to create, share, exchange information, ideas and pictures and videos in virtual communities and networks”.  The group noted that 76% of adolescents regularly use social media.

Proposed Research Priorities:

• What factors mediate and moderate relations between social media and developmental outcomes?
• How do youth perceive and understand privacy, how should we educate youth about privacy, and what privacy policies are needed?
• How do social media relate to, and impact, identity development?
• What is problematic about social media use?
• What is the right age, from a developmental perspective, to join a social media site (understanding that age here is poor proxy for developmental stage, but one likely to be used by policy-makers)?

Social Connection

Work Group Leader: Carrie James, Ph.D.

Important work has been done on the negative effects of digital media (and media in general), but there is a gap in the research regarding positive effects of media in general and interactive media in particular. There is a strong, known association between social connection and wellbeing.   This invites inquiry into the different kinds of empathy (for example, emotional empathy and cognitive empathy).  In face-to-face interactions, the two typically come together.  It remains to be determined whether the same is true in online interactions.

Gaps in our knowledge exist with respect “specific digital affordances”.  We do not fully understand where, when, how, and for whom they support positive social connection (including cognitive and emotional forms of empathy) and

different forms of wellbeing (such as physical wellbeing and psychosocial wellbeing, positive health behaviors, voice and agency in one’s community, and world resilience, self-compassion, self-regulation, and mindfulness).

Proposed Research Priorities:

• Conduct observational research that identifies some of the positive outcomes that come from existing uses in naturalistic settings (such as social media sites like Facebook).
• Use learning about what supports positive outcomes to amplify uses that support such outcomes.
• Develop new technologies that support positive outcomes.
• Use those technologies to reframe the conversation, to address overemphasis on restricting harmful media uses, and to promote technology uses that support positive outcomes.

Cyberbullying

Work Group Leader: Elizabeth Englander, Ph.D.

Children’s access to, and activity on, social media is nearly universal.  Everyone encounters some form of peer aggression or social cruelty.  These encounters have a profound psychological impact, including associations with anxiety, depression, suicide, and problems with peer relationships.  There are intersections between cyberbullying and issues of gender, sexuality, and substance abuse.  Cyberbullying also has a differential impact on clinical populations such as children with spectrum disorders or ADHD.  Research in related fields suggests that the adverse effects of cyberbullying (including cognitive and psychological effects) may be long term.

The study of cyberbullying has been impaired significantly by the lack of an operational definition of this phenomenon.  Basic work is needed on the taxonomy of different digital antisocial behaviors such as harassment and peer aggression.

Proposed Research Priorities:

This group proposed an initial phase of research focused on:

• nomenclature and taxonomy;
• qualitative differences in digital and traditional communication realms;
• how social actors’ perceptions and social norms differ between digital and non-digital environments;
• how developmental norming (what we can expect children to do, by the nature of their development) must happen;
• the role of hypersensitivity to social cues in digital environments, including the tendency to be wounded by everything and to be equally affected by errors of omission and commission;
• motivations;
• limitations of the bullying rubric; and
• the fluidity of roles and power structures in digital environments.

The group proposed a second phase of research consisting of:

• longitudinal research to understand both the short-term and long-term repercussions and effects of this kind of peer aggression;
• the development and study of targeted interventions, including targeted interventions for clinical groups;
• clarification of the roles of the criminal justice system, the legal system, legislators, parents and family, educational institutions, industry, and others with influence or interest in this arena;
• review of existing programs and nomenclature (such as “e-safety”, “digital literacy”, “media literacy”, etc.); and
• consideration of the larger society’s role in what’s happening online.

Internet Gaming Disorder

Work Group Leader: Sandra L. Calvert, Ph.D.

Internet Gaming Disorder is defined by the APA as persistent and recurrent use of the Internet to engage in games, often with other players, leading to clinically significant impairment or distress (5 of 9 symptoms):

• Preoccupation
• Withdrawal
• Tolerance
• Unsuccessful attempts to control use
• Loss of interest
• Continued use despite problems
• Deception
• Escaping negative moods
• Jeopardizing job, school, etc.

Proposed Research Priorities:

• What is the validity of the nine proposed criteria for Internet Gaming Disorder?
• What underlying needs does gaming meet, and when does this become pathological?  When does this behavior go from “coping” to “self-medicating”?
• Are some children at greater risk than others, and are there particular warning signs – etiology – for Internet game disorder?
• How do screening assessments match with clinical assessments?
• What is a healthy media diet, according to developmental stages, and how do we teach this concept?

Anxiety and Depression

Work Group Leader: David Bickham, Ph.D.

This group, comprised mostly of medical doctors, focused on suicidality.

Proposed Research Priorities:

• Conduct a multi-site, in-patient, psychiatric study to get at potential links between new media and suicidality and self-injury behavior.  This study would provide access to subjects’ online postings, and permit the content analysis needed to identify markers, within their communications, that define patterns leading to types of hospital admissions.  Such findings could be combined with reviews of their electronic charts, biomarkers, and stress to define who is at greatest risk of major adverse outcomes (suicidality).  The group believed that this proposal needed to be comprehensive – asking all of these questions, and harking back to National Children’s Study – and that validated depression and anxiety “attached” to this. There is a clear need for longitudinal data.
• Attach EMA burst samples to the proposed study, so that investigators can ask kids questions about their communications in real time (including about their experiences with symptoms of depression and anxiety over the course of the day).  Look deeply at the development arc of these behaviors, and individual moments of susceptibility, for the type of media that they’re using and feelings of depression and anxiety.
• With the EMA information, investigators could use a similar protocol to deliver some sort of intervention (for example, limiting identified exposure that’s been identified as creating high risk for suicidality/depression/anxiety), and empowering participants to change behavior.  This could help young people target themselves in directions that facilitate coping.  In the process, study subjects could cultivate communication patterns for reaching out to others for necessary psychological support by providing electronic signals that give them information and strategies in the moment.

Sleep – Impact of Media on Sleep and Health

Work Group Leader: Lauren Hale, Ph.D.

Between 50% and 90% of teens don’t get enough sleep.  About half of younger children are sleep-deprived, too. Electronic devices are present in 96% of older teens’ bedrooms.

Looking at the literature, 90% of studies show an adverse association between screen time and sleep.  The three mechanisms altering the sleep/arousal balance are time displacement, psychological stimulation, and light.

Healthy sleep in childhood is associated with physical health, psychological wellbeing, cognitive functioning, and reduced risk-taking behaviors.

Gaps in Research:

• There’s little high-quality observational research (“surveillance data”) on digital media and sleep.  This impairs our ability to understand the role of sleep.  Most studies are correlational.  They don’t show causation.
• Experimental research is needed to identify mechanisms at work in correlations between digital media and sleep.  There’s also a need to identify sleep’s role in other correlations between digital media and health outcomes.  We don’t know how much the effects of digital media on sleep affect and/or amplify other child health and development outcomes.  Sleep has NOT been fully incorporated into studies investigating effects of digital media on other outcomes.
• This group’s “big picture” observation is that their goal is to understand how the digital revolution is altering the sleep/arousal balance across the developmental spectrum (infancy to adulthood) and its impact on multiple health, learning, and safety outcomes (e.g., obesity, depression, risk taking, etc.)

Proposed Research Priorities:

• Conduct population-based longitudinal studies with validated and/or objective measures of media, sleep and health/safety.
• Evaluate the effectiveness of digital media interventions on sleep, health, and wellbeing.
• Seek to understand the magnitude of digital media (e.g., device types, duration, timing, and content) effects on sleep health in the real world, considering individual differences, and developmental stages.
• Perform longitudinal studies that embed “experimental” protocols that test the effects of light and media content on sleep, circadian rhythms, and arousal across childhood and adolescence
• Support the media research community in adding sleep as a dimension in future studies.

Intervention example:  Will a screen restriction intervention work to improve sleep and well-being outcomes?

1. Test Environmental Change (no screen in bedroom)
2. Test Behavioral Change (no media 2 hours before bed)
3. Test combined approach
4. Compare to control condition

Screen Time and Obesity

Work Group Leader: Thomas Robinson, Ph.D.

Obesity is among the most serious and challenging health problems globally.  Rates were relatively stable for decades, but doubled between 1980 and 1990, tripled by 2000, and continue to rise.  Approximately 15-20% of school age children and adolescents now meet the definition of obesity.    This poses a threat of such adverse future health consequences as heart attacks, strokes, cancer, and diabetes.  Between one-third and one-half of today’s children will become diabetic, contributing to a life expectancy shorter than their parents.  In terms of societal resource allocation, obesity now accounts for $150 billion in annual direct medical costs.  That makes it our second biggest driver of health care spending.  Only tobacco accounts for more morbidity and mortality worldwide.
Screen time is a known strong risk factor for obesity.  Reducing screen time is known to reduce weight gain.  Unfortunately, we know little about mobile and other new media influences in this context.  Neither have we effectively investigated how digital media may be used to influence weight constructively.  Research is needed to determine what works, in what contexts, and with whom.  Such studies must go beyond the reductionist style of research that looks only at one type of exposure and one type of outcome, and address complex systems through a holistic approach.

Proposed Research Priorities:

• Investigate the role of mobile and other new digital media use, and patterns of use, as they relate to obesity for children with different characteristics.
• Identify interventions (individual, family, school, community, policy) that mitigate the adverse effects of digital media use on obesity, and the potential moderators and mediators of intervention effects (e.g., content exposure, physical activity/inactivity, diet, biological factors, and sleep) with different characteristics. “Moderator questions” include, “What works? In which settings or contexts? Among whom?  The “mediator question” is “How?”
• Determine how we can apply and integrate theories and insights from multiple disciplines (e.g., behavioral science, communication, computer science, medicine and public health) to effectively use digital media interventions to prevent and reduce obesity.
• Discover the causal relationships and interactions (a “complex systems approach”) between and among obesity-related outcomes, on the one hand, and (i) media content (including, among others, marketing and advertising, message and modeling in entertainment programs and games); (ii) properties of different electronic media and the way the content is presented; and (iii) context (food environment, family, media use contact), on the other.

Privacy and Policy (Combined)

Work Group Leader:

These groups chose to combine, based on their shared belief that policy and privacy issues are inextricably bound.

The combined group expressed major concern over the lack of policy with respect to all the work groups’ subject areas.  Systems need to change to produce better outcomes, but technology use (for example, in education) is far ahead of research-based policy making.  Even current media policies are not being implemented effectively.

The group saw the absence of a PBS-like non-commercial source for digital media as a problem.  Everything is commercial, without the counterweight of a public-minded institution.

There’s been a fair amount of research on “use privacy” on the Internet, but mostly concerning what young adults choose to post online, and how they perceive their privacy risks.  In contrast, there has not been serious, deep consideration of the commercial context – the economic forces and institutional structures driving, and effectuating, the gathering and monetization of personal information. Related research topics include overt data collection, data mining, and user tracking.

There also has been little research on: (i) business models of digital media culture within which young people are growing up, and (ii) on the developmental processes of childhood and adolescence, on the one hand, and interactions with data collection, marketing and advertising in the digital context, on the other.

Generally speaking, teens have received relatively little attention from investigators, too.  That may explain why a gap persists in the legal privacy framework when it comes to teens.  (The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act only protects kids under 13.)

The policy focus in the US is on potential privacy harms.  That contrasts with the Europeans’ approach to privacy as a right, as seen in the Data Protection Directive and in the UN Convention on the International Rights of the Child.

Proposed Research Priorities:

• Identify opportunities for effective policy interventions at all levels (particularly federal, state, local).
• Identify developmental vulnerabilities of adolescents and their relationship to contemporary digital marketing practices.
• Seek models to convene interdisciplinary researchers to inform policy (for example, EU Kids Online).
• Investigate how to frame and translate social science research for policy makers and the public, particularly and specifically to take action.
• Explore how the digital marketplace works (structure, operations, practices).