Critical Thinking In a world of technological advancement, mobile devices are wi

Question

Critical Thinking

In a world of technological advancement, mobile devices are widely used by people of all ages, including children. A new study found that when children are in tough situations and are having emotional difficulties, their parents are more likely to give an iPad than when the children are behaving calmly.

For some, it may be tempting to hand over mobile devices to a "difficult" child. 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 down when they were having social and emotional difficulties. The same parents were less likely to hand over the iPad to reward calm behavior.

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 device during a variety of situations. Different scenarios include eating, being in public, during chores, when the children are in distress and at bedtime.

"We know that parents of babies and toddlers with difficult behavior disproportionately use television and videos as calming tools. We wanted to explore whether the same might be true for mobile technology like phones and tablets," said Dr. Jenny Radesky, study's lead author.

They found that parents were more likely to use mobile devices as a coping strategy to pacify children who are having tantrums.

"My concern is that parents are using it as a 'let me hand this over to you and let this distract you from whatever distress you were just in,' because kids learn from handling their own distress not by being distracted from it," Radesky said.

a. Describe the problem with the method-match in the study

b. Briefly describe alternate operational definitions for both the predictor and the outcome variables. Ensure that your suggestions would better address this claim by proposing a strong method-match.

Explanation / Answer

1. Describe the problem with the method-match in the study

In the study, the parents are trying to distract the children from their stress rather than trying to teach them to cope it. Such distraction is only being given by the low income families. The problem with this study is that there is no control group and there is no standard against which the results have been made.

2. Briefly describe alternate operational definitions for both the predictor and the outcome variables. Ensure that your suggestions would better address this claim by proposing a strong method-match.

Here, they have chosen low income families and making the judgement on the basis of the same, it may also be possible, that such actions of the parent might be due to their thinking. Here, gifting of a mobile device can be the dependent. Independent variable has to be the parent's income, with which the current results can be matched, since these Results only demonstrate the actions of a particular strata of the society and cannot be generalised to all the divisions.

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