[arrrg]

Do you want to pay for such a study? I’m sure that many psychology or sociology departments would happily take your money.

But even with money, studying long term effects of media use is fiendishly difficult. Most studies looking at the impact of media use focus on short term effects, because that’s in many cases the only pragmatic solution.

For studying long term effects, experiments pretty much fall flat. You cannot control the media exposure of people for weeks and months. Even this experiment (probably) didn’t stop participants from using other media before they came to the lab, so control over media exposure was limited to the 2.5h or 50m.

So you have to rely on surveys and do a panel study (i.e. ask the same people the same questions at different points in time) – and that’s just messy. The randomization can no longer do all the work for you and you have to control for all variables that could plausibly also influence participants behavior, independent of media exposure. Expect mostly suggestions and never really solid results from that.