MediaElectronic Media Use and Adolescent Health and Well-Being: Cross-Sectional Community Study
Section snippets
Design
Data were drawn from the third wave of the population-based longitudinal Health of Young Victorians Study, whose design has been reported elsewhere.20 Briefly, participants were selected for wave 1 in 1997 from across the state of Victoria, Australia, by means of a stratified 2-stage random sampling design based on school education sector (government, Catholic, or independent) and year level. The baseline response rate for prep (first school year) through third grade students was 83.2% (1943 of
Results
The sample comprised 925 adolescents (466 boys; mean ± SD age 16.1 ± 1.2 years), of whom 80 (8.7%) were in the first (most disadvantaged) SEIFA quartile, and of whom 239 (26.1%), 312 (34%), and 286 (31.2%) were in the second, third, and fourth (least disadvantaged) quartiles, respectively. The average PedsQL (health status) total mean score was 79.7 ± 10.8, the average SDQ (behavior) Total Difficulties score was 9.3 ± 5.0, and the mean KIDSCREEN (HRQoL) value was 47.5 ± 7.1. Although most participants
Discussion
This study confirmed high levels of electronic media use (averaging more than 3 hours per day), with television (just over 2 hours per day) followed by video games and computers, and the least time devoted to telephone use. High levels of video game use was associated with increased psychological distress and poorer physical and psychosocial well-being, HRQoL, and global health, while computer use was weakly associated with a lower risk of psychological distress. However, television was
Acknowledgments
We thank the students and parents/guardians who participated in each of the 3 waves of the Health of Young Victorians Study (HOYVS). We also thank the many schools that allowed us to visit to survey the students. We acknowledge the work of all the field workers who conducted the data collection, as well as the full HOYVS investigator team.
The third wave of the Health of Young Victorians Study was funded by Australian National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC; project grant 334303). Dr
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