[paytonjjones]

This is a weak study that is exemplary of psychology's weak experimentation culture and correlation/causation laundering, especially with regard to self-report.

The heavily hinted implication is that device use damages relationships. But look at what they actually measured. They ask adolescents to answer questions like:

"My primary caregiver ignores me when they are on a device." (DAIS, their new scale)

And then also ask them to answer questions like:

"I often worry that this person doesn't really care for me." (ECR-RS)

And then act like it's a revelation that these two self-report scales are correlated.

A much more plausible causal explanation is that a single psychological variable (e.g. a bad relationship) causes both self reports, rather than the implied pathway that device use causes A, which then causes B.

[irjustin]

I largely agree this is a weak study, but it also feels like no matter how you run this study it's going to be flawed.

Parent-child interactions, relationships, feelings are probably the hardest thing to quantify at any scale.

In the end, it's really, "Pay more attention to your kids", which is a pretty good universal message to put across.

[andai]

I forget the terminology but I read something recently about how people are paying too much attention to their kids and it's making their kids neurotic.

Like when kids were growing up a couple decades ago they could just do whatever they wanted and those folks turned out all right. And now we've got people obsessing over where their children are and literally tracking their location, and the results don't seem to be so great.

(I heard that this difference had actually been quantified but unfortunately I don't have a link.)

I remember something about how, some percentage of children are not even allowed to leave the yard. Whereas their parents were just roaming for miles, at a much younger age.

Although I suppose at the same time, we're also less present with each other. So I guess there's at least two dimensions to that.

I guess the first one would be, are you relaxed and do you trust them to take care of themselves, even at a young age.

And the second one would be... are you actually there, or is it just your body that's there.

[dinfinity]

It's an interesting question:

Are people who are very very securely attached to their parents happy later in life, or is there a ceiling? The terminology invites certain conclusions here.

Maybe the whole attention thing is more a matter of quality, rather than quantity

[makeitdouble]

There is always a question of whether a bad study is better than no study.

I think weak studies validating people's natural intuitions tend to do more damage than we give them credit for. Even if another better d signed study does way more work and comes with clear results that disprove the natural intuiton, it will be buried in the sea of low effort studies and people will already have settle the issue in their minds as "proven by science".

[somenameforme]

100%. I completely agree with this study's 'findings' but also agree the study is garbage.

So many studies now a days have experiments designed to confirm a hypothesis instead of challenge it. They should be doing everything possible they can to disprove their hypothesis and only accept it after all attempts at falsification fail. But of course that's in idealized science. In reality, publish or perish means you need to get something published and negative results don't get published. And so this study, like what seems to be most now a days, is designed to prove their hypothesis - which ironically proves nothing.

[rmunn]

This (experiments only designed to confirm a hypothesis and not trying to falsify it) is also part of the reason why so many studies can't be reproduced later, the "reproducibility crisis". One of my relatives, a medical doctor who just recently retired, has often lamented the incentive structure that results in negative results not getting published. (She has also said that she wants to see about seven studies pointing in the same direction before she starts to take it seriously).

[paytonjjones]

A better version of this study would be to run an experiment where you take away (or heavily restrict) parental phone access over a month or two and measure the parent-child relationship vs. a control group.

> "Pay more attention to your kids", which is a pretty good universal message to put across.

I wouldn't be too sure of that actually: https://www.archbridgeinstitute.org/the-secret-to-parenting-...

[tgv]

> A much more plausible causal explanation

Why is that much more plausible? It implies that it has always been there, and that nothing has changed since the last century, which is unlikely. Unless you want to introduce some other recent factor, but that is going to be even less likely.

And why? Because other studies have shown how addictive "phone" use is, and how it isolates people. And addicts (drugs, alcohol) are bad caretakers.

So there's really nothing that makes the explanation implausible.

You may ask yourself if it's not your own addiction speaking.

[paytonjjones]

I find it more plausible given my priors as a research psychologist.

Correlational overlap between self-report scales is common. It's actually so common that at decent sample sizes, almost any arbitrary self-report will significantly correlate purely on valence. For instance, one should expect a correlation between people self-reporting "I had a tough childhood" with "I frequently suffer from skin rashes". This is because trait neuroticism (the degree to which people are prone to feel negative emotion) is a major driver of how people interpret and respond to scales generally.

In contrast, psychologists mightily struggle to find replicable experimental results. That's what you need here.

[tgv]

I know survey data is weak. I think you'll find that 95% of all psychological research is bad.

But your explanation isn't "much more plausible". It is based on absolutely nothing, and the priori are against it. You only have a vague idea of correlation between answers (based on probably equally unreliable papers), but nothing on the missing factor. In this paper, however, they at least take some effort to find structure in the responses, and this factor correlated stronger than the others. Shaky, but it has a basis: phones/social media/etc. are terribly addictive.

> In contrast, psychologists mightily struggle to find replicable experimental results. That's what you need here.

No, that's not needed here. The paper might not be good, but we need to get rid of the phones. It's obvious that it's a problem. Just try to take someone's phone away. What "we" do not need here is distraction from the problem.

[magicalhippo]

To be fair they do kinda spell this out in the discussion section:

This study does not come without limitations. First, it is important to recognize that the present findings are correlational and cross-sectional in nature and therefore do not permit conclusions regarding directionality or causality. Although caregiver device-centric behaviors and adolescent attachment insecurity were robustly associated, it remains unclear whether perceived caregiver distraction is related to attachment insecurity, whether adolescents with higher levels of attachment insecurity are more likely to perceive caregiver behavior as inattentive or disruptive (i.e., reverse causality), or whether both reflect other unmeasured contextual or relational factors. Second, several of the DAIS items assess emotional reactions, which could conceptually overlap with anxious attachment. Thus, the relationship between the DAIS and ECR may reflect a partial overlap of the constructs. Third, both the DAIS and ECR-RS are self-reported measures at a single time point, which may have shared method variance. [...]

I definitely think some people get addicted to the phones, and that addiction is negative for the relationship with the child. I also think one can be active on a phone while also being attentive and available to the child, which would be less problematic for the relationship.

I also don't think the phone is new in this regard. I've certainly heard many stories from back in the days about parents being glued to the TV or work and not being attentive to their child. It's even the point of the quite well known song Cat's in the Cradle[1].

The main difference I guess is that the phone is so prevalent in the population, and there are a lot of apps and sites that are engineered to grab your attention.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat%27s_in_the_Cradle

[twnettytwo]

IMO this isn't necessarily bad (it's one way to get data), but the numbers are meaningless without a control. Unfortunately, I think we missed that bus by ~20 years. Had the same study been conducted every few years over the last two decades, I think it would have been valuable. Maybe it is still valuable to do this once every few years? (I think that everyone in 2026 is maximally addicted to mobile phones, but maybe I'm wrong and it can get worse).

[tangenter]

My dude, I don’t know how to explain this to you but phones and computers are addictive for people. They get hooked on them to feed the lizard brain with digital junk food engineered for engagement.

[etrautmann]

That’s irrelevant to the issue with the study that the parent identified.

[Groxx]

Manipulating "studies" doesn't help reveal how true this is (or even if it is, do we perhaps have an inherent level of addiction and phones are just an easy target?), nor help find effective ways to reduce it.