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Studying the effects of children’s screen time on specific aspects of the social development, I would focus on temperament as a dependent variable and gender as another dependent variable. Temperament can cause reactions and changes to a child’s attention control and inhibitory control, and discomfort when being over-stimulated by technology. A child can have trouble with attention control, and having an increased amount of screen time can cause difficulty when doing normal activities or even when sleeping. Assuming a child may have difficulty with attention, it is possible a child can have issues suppressing responses and become moody or irritable when experiencing object loss or removal. I believe it would be interesting to investigate if a child’s gender can differ from each other, since it can be assumed from personal experience that boys may have a temperament that is more intense. I would use a sequential design to observe the lives of participants over a long period time to evaluate their social skill development, because it allows to follow them throughout their lives as they progress socially to examine changes and causes. It also allows to measure group of participants in different age groups at the same time. When creating a study involving children, it is important to consider not purposefully causing them negative temperaments and to find children that already use a lot of screen time. I believe this study should take a more naturalistic approach to avoid causing harm to the children that may participate, to prevent causing them harm in their futures.
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Screen time has become an enormous monster that represents a challenging behavior that parents fear off but, at the same time, for many others, is the perfect nanny for their children. Screen time (tv, tablet, iPad, phone, etc.) after many types of research has been found to originate behavioral problems in the first place, taking into consideration the lack of social interactions and having “real” experiences, the children have poor or none skills to control their emotions, attitudes, mood, and attention. The use of a cell phone (as a screen) will be one of the focuses to begin assessing the use and effects of screen time since cell phones are the most popular among children. Using the measurement methods, a questionnaire will be a tool that can cover more population and allows to know the families and children backgrounds. One of the factors to consider in the research is that self-reporting may not be 100 percent honest, resulting in a flaw at the end of the study, that is why an informant report which means a close person to the child will be a better source of information when answering the questionnaire. “Variety of measurement method options are available to assess important dimensions of children’s behavioral, cognitive, emotional, and neurodevelopmental functioning. These methods are explicit plans to observe and assess children and their surroundings in ways that will reveal relatively clear relations among variables of interest. “(Parke et al., 2019). In times of COVID-19 will be very difficult to fight against screen time since parents want to protect their children the most, even though this means lockdown over months and no social interactions with people outside of the home. To many people, this is the only way to cope with the COVID-19 situation, but in the long run, it will have its side effects as well.
