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Reply to: Underestimating digital media harm

Nature Human Behaviour volume 4, pages 349–351 (2020)Cite this article

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The Original Article was published on 17 April 2020

replying to J. M. Twenge et al. Nature Human Behaviour https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-020-0839-4 (2020)

In their critique, Twenge et al.1 incorrectly concluded that the small associations between adolescent well-being and use of digital technology presented in Orben and Przybylski2 are the product of “analytical decisions that resulted in lower effect sizes”. Although some of the concerns raised were already addressed in the Supplementary Information of the original paper2, we refute the other concerns by providing additional analyses based on the study data.

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Fig. 1: SCA of the Millennium Cohort Study showing associations between prespecified well-being subscales and digital technology use for males and females.

Data availability

The data that support the findings of this reply are available from Monitoring the Future (MTF) and the UK data service (MCS), but restrictions apply to the availability of these data, which were used under license for the current study and are therefore not publicly available. However, data are available from the relevant third-party repository after agreement to their terms of usage. Information about data collection and questionnaires is available on the OSF at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/7XHA2. For brevity, we have not included all of the sample size measurements in this manuscript, but they are available in the data files on the OSF.

Code availability

The code used to analyse the relevant data are available on the Open Science Framework at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/BYQM5.

References

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  2. Orben, A. & Przybylski, A. K. The association between adolescent well-being and digital technology use. Nat. Hum. Behav. 3, 173–182 (2019).

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

    Amy Orben

  2. Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

    Amy Orben

  3. Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Andrew K. Przybylski

  4. Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Andrew K. Przybylski

Authors
  1. Amy Orben
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  2. Andrew K. Przybylski
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Contributions

A.O. and A.K.P. are authors of the original paper. A.O. and A.K.P. conceptualised and wrote the reply; A.O. conceptualised and ran the analyses.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Amy Orben.

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Competing interests

A.O. and A.K.P. have no competing financial interests; in the last five years, A.K.P. has served in an unpaid advisory capacity with the OECD, UNICEF, Facebook Inc., Google Inc. and the ParentZone. A.O. and A.K.P. have been called as expert witnesses for a variety of UK governmental bodies and departments including Parliamentary Select Committees.

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Extended data

Extended Data Fig. 1 Comparing digital technology use correlation with well-being measures to listening to music with well-being measures in the MTF dataset.

Plots of the variables listening to music and mean digital technology use against the mean of all well-being measures in the survey. The small points are individual participants, while the lines are mean values.

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Orben, A., Przybylski, A.K. Reply to: Underestimating digital media harm. Nat Hum Behav 4, 349–351 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-020-0840-y

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