Research Types
Surveys
Although they don’t tell the whole story, surveys can provide a useful baseline for noting trends and informing debate, especially when they are supplemented with more detailed case studies. Surveys provide useful data on the prevalence of different forms of digital media but they need to be interpreted with care. Although most surveys involve a lot of respondents, that isn’t always the case and it doesn’t necessarily mean that the claims are true. How did the researchers get the responses? Sometimes they use telephone interviews, sometimes they use members of the public who have been recruited – and paid - for this purpose.
Experiments and Randomised Controlled Trials
Studies that are designed as randomised controlled trials are sometimes considered the gold standard for research. However, they don’t take fully into account the day-to-day realities of family life because they try to control for different influences. The process of looking at some of the different studies for the ‘big six’ suggests that they tend to be used to emphasise the dangers rather than the benefits of digital media.
How would you conduct a study into the effects of watching television? Even if you could find enough families without a TV for comparative purposes, you couldn’t control for all the other variables, ie all the things that make one study situation and one family different from another. For instance, how much is playback used and how much TV is watched in real time? What counts as ‘watching’ television? Does that include programmes on laptops and tablets? What about doing some online shopping or sending text messages while ‘watching’ television? Does that include watching TV on the train? Not having a television is fairly unusual so how typical are the families without a television these days?
Even if we could control variables like these and get a number of roughly similar families, how would you look at the effects over time? The children involved might also be watching TV at friends’ houses or with their grandparents. Looking at the effects of digital media isn’t the same as trials for new drugs where participants are matched as far as possible. Some get the drug and some don’t. The ones who don’t get the new drug get a placebo – they don’t know if they’ve got the drug or not. And in ‘double blind’ trials, the researchers don’t know which ones have got the drugs either – all the families are pre-coded – but it’s not possible to organise a trial on the effects of television or computers in this way.
Real Life Studies
Studies that look at real families in natural situations without interfering in what they would usually do are sometimes known as real life studies. They might give us a more realistic view of family life but all situations get changed by the presence of a researcher. Studies like this tend to be much smaller in scale – it wouldn’t be possible to include thousands of families because it would take up too much time and need too many researchers – so there are questions about how much you can generalise from a fairly small number of participants.
Systematic Reviews
Systematic reviews are also used in the medical field. Where there are lots of studies on a particular disease or drug it can be helpful to go through all of them systematically to see if patterns emerge. The authors don’t do new research but gather together studies which fulfil certain criteria. However, these are difficult to achieve in the area of children’s uses of digital media because the definitions used vary, or the age of the children, or the types of media they’re accessing.