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by iak8god 1035 days ago
They had students use screen tracking software to log what apps they were using. The researchers ignored TikTok because it wasn't included in some pre-existing methodology they were following.

Ignoring TikTok for any reason in 2021-2022 is a huge mistake. Once I saw that, I decided I'm not interested in their findings.
1 comments
InSteady 1035 days ago
That's fair. It sounds like they wanted to iterate on something that's been established on a preliminary basis, which makes the choice to stay within the parameters of of the original study likely the correct one. We have to be choosy about which variables we tweak when building upon previous works, otherwise people will correctly point out ambiguities if not outright flaws in reasoning when the authors analyze current results in the context of the previous study (the whole point of iterating).

This approach does have it's drawbacks though, such as rapidly fading into irrelevance and obscurity given the ever-changing landscape of the study environment. It is of course your prerogative to disregard research as you see fit, but hopefully we can agree that this isn't bad science (at least not on that basis), even if you find the results uninteresting.

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iak8god 1035 days ago
I slightly misinterpreted the following from the article:

> We decided to assess social media use across four platforms for three reasons. First, Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook were the most popular social media platforms among college students at the time of our study design (Perrin and Anderson, 2019).

This is telling us that they designed the study at a time when a 2019 report on social media usage was the most up-to-date available. I misread initially, thinking that (Perrin and Anderson, 2019) was the study design they followed, but it is actually this: Perrin, A., & Anderson, M. (2019). Share of US adults using social media, including Facebook, is mostly unchanged since 2018. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/04/10/share-of-u-....

I get that they probably didn't feel like revising their design in the fall of 2021, but this would have been the right thing to do, given trends in social media use in young people at the time. It is odd that this 2023 paper doesn't even mention TikTok. Its exclusion, justified or not, is a limitation worth noting.

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