About this srcd poster session

---

Panel information
Panel 24. Technology, Media & Child Development

Abstract

---

Childhood is becoming an increasingly digital experience. Technology use features a variety of factors that can simultaneously promote and be a risk factor for healthy human development and thereby impact child wellbeing (e.g., Ching-Ting et al., 2014; Granic et al., 2020; Paulus et al., 2019; Stiglic et al., 2022). Despite this, psychological research on children’s technology use and wellbeing has been mostly reduced to examinations of the impact of screen time (e.g., Kerai et al., 2022; Stiglic & Viner, 2019), with children in middle childhood and their perspectives largely left out of psychological research. The aim of the present exploratory study was to capture children’s perspectives on how technology influences children’s social and emotional wellbeing.

Drawing on extensive work suggesting that children are good at explaining emotions (e.g., Kramer & Lagattuta, 2022; Lagattuta, 2005), children aged 7- to 9-years-old (N = 27, M = 8.46, SD = 0.78, 55.56% male) were asked to explain affective states, positive and negative, resulting from technology use. Children were read a short story about a series of peers who used technology and then experienced four key emotions: happy, sad, excited, worried, and they were then asked if they could think of a reason why the subject experienced the emotion. A priori thematic coding was utilized to code children’s explanations. Frequency statistics and point-biserial correlations were conducted.

Out of the 200 total codes, the most frequently mentioned causes of emotional states when they were considered together were: maintaining access/acquisition, accounting for 41% of codes, followed by interpersonal (28.5%), mastery (17.5%), autonomy (7.5%), safety/privacy (4%), and physical effects (1.5%). Considering the importance of worry to mental wellbeing, we next focus on explanations of worry (See Table 2).

Children’s explanations of worry were related to safety/privacy concerns 14.6% of the time, suggesting safety is a concern for children in this young age range. A median split of age revealed that safety concerns were comparable but increasing with age (13% vs. 16%). These rates are high considering children’s choice of explanatory reasons were entirely spontaneous. This suggests that many children are aware of how technology can threaten their safety and the risks associated with digital contexts (Smahel et al., 2020; Sun et al., 2021).

More substantial age-related differences were found regarding explanations of worry based on interpersonal concerns, making up 13% of younger children’s explanations but 36% of older children’s explanations. Point-biserial correlations revealed age was moderately positively correlated with interpersonal worries (r(25) = .381, p = .05) such that as age increases, so do worries about interpersonal relationships and harm online. This is consistent with work suggesting children become more aware of their social sphere during middle childhood (Davis-Kean et al., 2009; McCarthy & Jones, 2007).

We are still actively collecting data and plan to examine the dataset further for relations among technological use patterns and the codes we present here. Through analyzing children’s explanations and narratives regarding technology’s impact on their emotional states, this study offers valuable insight into children’s perspectives around important topics such as safety and social wellbeing.

Author information

Author	Role
Allyson Paton, University of Manitoba	Presenting author
Shaylene Nancekivell, University of Manitoba	Non-presenting author

⇦ Back to session