Jul 7, 2023 06:56 PM
However, the "hidden" motivations that exist beforehand go both ways. It's inevitable that a defense impulse is going to arise to protect anything that has become a key part of our lives, but is being attacked as the "source of _X_ problem". The soft sciences are inherently screwed-up with biases no matter which direction you approach an issue from. And because "getting something wrong" in them doesn't cause quick or overt catastrophic disaster like bad engineering (the hard sciences), the "crap" can linger around for decades -- especially if it's facilitating something desired in politics or business by the administrative level of academic institutions.
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https://www.sciencefocus.com/the-human-b...-children/
EXCERPTS: It’s tempting to think that our digital lives on TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat are the cause of a child mental health crisis. But there might be something altogether more analogue going on, argues Prof Pete Etchells.
[...] while these sorts of datasets are hugely powerful entities, they don’t allow us to get any closer to understanding whether those relationships are causal in nature.
And as to why we find such disparate findings, research published in 2019 suggests that whether or not we find correlations in the data has more to do with how researchers’ biases influence data analysis, as opposed to whether there’s an actual signal in the data.
The study, from the Oxford Internet Institute, showed that in datasets like the YRBS, there are a huge number of questions that are asked about digital technology use, wellbeing and other factors that can impact both.
It’s what makes these sorts of surveys so powerful from a scientific perspective: because of the vast amount of data they collect, you can ask questions about almost any aspect of human behaviour.
But it also means that the number of sensible and theoretically justifiable ways in which you can combine measures of tech use and wellbeing to ask a meaningful question about how they’re linked can, in some cases, run into the trillions.
Without due care and attention then, researchers may unwittingly fall into the trap of running multiple analyses until they ‘find’ the answer they think they wanted in the first place.
That means it’s incredibly important to have a sound theoretical base for asking those questions in the first place, which is something we don’t really have at the moment.
It’s a fact that speaks to a more fundamental issue, one that both researchers and journalists need to address before we can make any progress in understanding what’s going wrong for teenage mental health.
That issue, I think, is that we’re asking the wrong questions about the role that digital technology and social media have to play... (MORE - missing details)
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https://www.sciencefocus.com/the-human-b...-children/
EXCERPTS: It’s tempting to think that our digital lives on TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat are the cause of a child mental health crisis. But there might be something altogether more analogue going on, argues Prof Pete Etchells.
[...] while these sorts of datasets are hugely powerful entities, they don’t allow us to get any closer to understanding whether those relationships are causal in nature.
And as to why we find such disparate findings, research published in 2019 suggests that whether or not we find correlations in the data has more to do with how researchers’ biases influence data analysis, as opposed to whether there’s an actual signal in the data.
The study, from the Oxford Internet Institute, showed that in datasets like the YRBS, there are a huge number of questions that are asked about digital technology use, wellbeing and other factors that can impact both.
It’s what makes these sorts of surveys so powerful from a scientific perspective: because of the vast amount of data they collect, you can ask questions about almost any aspect of human behaviour.
But it also means that the number of sensible and theoretically justifiable ways in which you can combine measures of tech use and wellbeing to ask a meaningful question about how they’re linked can, in some cases, run into the trillions.
Without due care and attention then, researchers may unwittingly fall into the trap of running multiple analyses until they ‘find’ the answer they think they wanted in the first place.
That means it’s incredibly important to have a sound theoretical base for asking those questions in the first place, which is something we don’t really have at the moment.
It’s a fact that speaks to a more fundamental issue, one that both researchers and journalists need to address before we can make any progress in understanding what’s going wrong for teenage mental health.
That issue, I think, is that we’re asking the wrong questions about the role that digital technology and social media have to play... (MORE - missing details)