A report in Time magazine carries the headline, "Cell phone distracted parenting can have long-term consequences: Study". In the video accompanying the story, the narrator warns:
Devoting more attention to your smartphones than to your children could mean that they'll have improper brain development and emotional disorders later in life.
That sounds serious. Put down this blog right now and pay attention to your kiddos! On the other hand, keep on listening, and you'll hear that the study in question was done on....rats.
a) Before reading the description of the study, what are the conceptual variables (constructs) that the journalist wants you to believe are linked? (Hint: What are the three variables in the red quote above?)
Now, read this excerpt from the Time article and decide how each of those conceptual variables was operationalized in the study:
Dr. Tallie Baram, professor of pediatrics and anatomy-neurobiology at University of California, Irvine, and her colleagues used a rat model to study how good but disrupted attention from mothers can affect their newborns. Baram placed some mothers and their pups in modified cages that did not have sufficient material for nesting or bedding. This was enough to distract the mothers into running around looking for better surroundings and end up giving their babies interrupted and unreliable attention. Baram and her team compared the development of newborns raised in this environment to those raised in the normal cages where mothers had enough material to create a comfortable home.
When the offspring grew older, the researchers tested them on how much sugar solution they ate, and how they played with their peers, two measures of how much pleasure the animals were feeling and a proxy for their emotional development. The rats raised in the modified environments consistently ate less of the sugar solution and spent less of their time playing and chasing their peers than the rats raised in the normal setting.
b) Rats don't use cell phones, obviously. How was "Distracted parenting" operationalized here?
c) How were "Emotional disorders later in life" operationalized in this study?
d) How was "Improper brain development" operationalized?
e) What do you think? To what extent is it reasonable to generalize from rat models of parenting to human parenting?
f) When the journalist (and, indeed, the scientist) go beyond the rat model and apply these results to human parents, which validity are they working with?
You might have concluded that a study on rats has a way to go before it can be applied to human kids, and you'd have a good point. But before you dismiss the entire study, you should know that there's a great deal of experimental, behavioral evidence on real human children on the topic of responsive parenting. Studies typically find that attentive, responsive parenting when kids are young can lead to improved outcomes, as I have blogged about here. Many of these studies are conducted by my colleague Mary Dozier with her colleagues and students.
Many thanks to Dr. Barbara Sarnecka of University of California-Irvine for bringing this example to my attention!
Selected answers
a) the variables are "devoting attention to smartphones", "brain development" and "emotional disorders later in life"
b) Distracted parenting was operationalized via giving mothers proper amounts of bedding or insufficient bedding.
c) Emotional disorders were operationalized via sugar solution and playing with peers.
d) The journalist's story does not mention how they measured brain development (as far as I could see). Perhaps the published study includes the data on this variable.
e) Room for discussion here!
f) External validity
