Growing up in a digital world: A synergistic approach to understanding media use in children ages 1-8 years

Overall Project summary
Rapid growth in access to digital media is accompanied by a scarcity of research examining complex, real-time
family media context and sociocognitive outcomes, driven in part by a lack of comprehensive measurement
tools. To meet this challenge, the PI’s interdisciplinary research team developed a multi-method, scalable,
cost-effective toolkit called the Comprehensive Assessment of Family Media Exposure (CAFE) Toolkit. The
toolkit is designed to capture the content and context of early media exposure (Barr et al., 2020; Radesky et
al., 2020a). While this toolkit represents a substantial step forward in characterizing the family media ecology,
progress in understanding the effects of media exposure on child outcomes has also been limited by the lack
of large and representative longitudinal datasets, the difficulty of tracking quality of content in an ever-changing
media environment, and the lack of a mechanism to rapidly share and analyze results in a theoretically driven
manner. To overcome these limitations in the field, the overarching goal of this Research Program
proposal is to examine trajectories of media use - characterizing the context, content, and problematic
uses of media - in 1200 children aged between 1 to 7 years, assessing temporal associations with emotion
regulation and social competence using a cohort sequential design. The Research Program includes three
longitudinal studies, collecting data in three cohorts that span the entire age range (1-3, 3-5, 5-7 year olds).
The work described in this application will also produce research infrastructure to increase the efficiency of
coding the quality of media content, a bottleneck in the field. Finally, the data will be integrated, shared,
visualized and analyzed in a shared analytic research hub. The proposed research is significant because it
would be the first synergistic effort to utilize a comprehensive assessment of the family media ecology in a
large, diverse, longitudinal sample to identify antecedents of problematic media use in early childhood as well
as specific media use patterns that support social and emotional development in early childhood. The
proposed work is innovative because it (1) uses a multi-method, comprehensive assessment of the family
media ecology; (2) applies an ecological lens to study media effects and socio-emotional development within
the family system; (3) maximizes impact and efficiency with synergistic science; (4) streamlines content coding
in an ever-changing media environment; and (5) builds a collaborative platform for cleaning, integrating, and
analyzing shared data for reuse.

Grant Number: 5P01HD109907-03
NIH Institute/Center: NIH
Principal Investigator: RACHEL BARR