The headline for a story on Tech Times reads, "Parents of 'difficult children' likely to use ipads to pacify kids." The story is about a survey reported in the medical journal JAMA Pediatrics.
According to a new study by researchers from the C.S. Mott Children's Hospital at the University of Michigan, parents from low-income families were more likely to give mobile devices to calm children with social and emotional difficulties.Published in the journal JAMA Pediatrics, the researchers recruited 144 healthy children between the ages of 15 and 36 months from low-income families. The researchers asked the parents how often they give or allow the use of mobile devices during a variety of situations. Different scenarios include eating, being in public, during chores, when the children are in distress and at bedtime.
What were the results?
They found that parents were more likely to use mobile devices as a coping strategy to pacify children who are having tantrums to keep the peace at home.
a) What kind of claim is it to say "Parents of 'difficult children' likely to use ipads to pacify kids" (Frequency? Association? or Causal?)
What are the two variables in this claim?
b) Consider each of the two variables in this claim. How did they operationalize each variable in the study? Was each variable measured or manipulated?
c) Is this a correlational study or an experiment? How do you know?
d) The headline implies that the parents used ipads mainly "to pacify difficult children". Is that accurate, according to what you've read about the study's methods? Did they actually ask about children's levels of behavioral problems?
e) Sketch a carefully-labelled graph of the result that they described, especially in light of your answer to d) above.
Suggested answers
a) This is an association claim, because it's only stating that one variable goes with another variable. The two variables suggested in the claim are 1) Using mobile devices or not and 2) Degree of difficulty of the child's behavior.
b) According to the journalist's coverage, these two variables were operationalized via self-report, apparently through a questionnaire. Both variables were apparently measured (it states that the researchers "asked the parents..."). I think the first variable could be called "using a mobile device or not" and the second one could be the situation (In public, doing chores, in distress, at bedtime).
c) This seems to be a correlational study because the key variables were measured via self-report.
d) Notably, the method seems to suggest that parents were asked how often they use ipads in different situations, and the results indicated that parents reported using the ipads more often at home during tantrums. Therefore, the results and the method that were described don't seem to measure "difficult children" but rather "difficult situations."
e) To graph this outcome: They found that parents were more likely to use mobile devices as a coping strategy to pacify children who are having tantrums to keep the peace at home, you could have created a bar graph, with different situations on the x-axis (such as "having tantrums," "bedtime," "during chores" etc.) and have the level of using the ipad on the y-axis. The bar for "having tantrums" would presumably be the highest bar.
Alternatively, you could make a scatterplot, with "difficulty of the situation " on one axis, and "likelihood of using ipad" on the other axis, and the scatterplot would have a positive slope.
