I was astounded to read about new survey research from Scott Frank, MD, MS, who — when commenting about his new findings — was widely quoted as saying, “The startling results of this study suggest that when left unchecked texting and other widely popular methods of staying connected can have dangerous health effects on teenagers.”
Of course it would indeed be startling if his study had demonstrated a clear causative relationship — you know, like A causes B — between texting and the unhealthy teen behaviors the researchers studied.
But of course, this is not what they found. They conducted a survey and, like researchers do, found that a bunch of variables are inter-related. What that relationship exactly is, is anybody’s guess.
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Oy. Didn’t these people pay attention in ANY of their undergrad courses?
Correlation does not equal causation.
Now please excuse me while I go bang my head against my desk
OMG! TYVM for your voice of reason. You have to wonder what Scott Frank gets out of having his research blown out of all reasonable proportion. Will he get tenure faster by making himself the Paris Hilton of research?
I agree the concusions of this research team were so very wrong! Here’s what I think of it!
http://thesecondopiniontribune.blogspot.com/2010/11/teens-who-text-lot-live-unsafe-lives.html
I am truly grateful for this blog, and it makes me proud to be a member of the thinking community.
Heard the headlines on the news so I read the article linked in Psyche Central and couldn’t believe my eyes. It read like a bad logic joke. Is this April 1st?
But wait, I also found this report:
“Researchers, who presented the findings at the American Public Health Association’s 138th Annual Meeting & Exposition in Denver, surveyed a cross section of high school students from the Midwest and assessed whether use of communication technology could be associated with poor health behaviors, including smoking, drinking and sexual activity.”
So perhaps some of us read the wrong articles before we reacted. Still, I would like to be reassured that a county-wide “cross section” had been used for the survey.
I hate this. WHY do people always write articles like that? No wonder Americans are so confused about health (and science in general). Usually, though, journalists are to blame. If it’s the actual researcher, that’s even more ridiculous.
You’re right to take the media to task for assuming that correlation equals causation, and what Mr. Frank was quoted as saying (in this instance) did not help.
However, in its coverage, the *Chicago Sun-Times* at least took pains to explain that the link was not causal, and quoted Mr. Frank in a way that indicated he knew that perfectly well: http://www.suntimes.com/lifestyles/health/2881728,CST-NWS-text10.article.
So far as I can tell from the study abstract, however, it’s not correct to suggest that hyper-texting and hyper-networking teens (to use the study’s terminology) have more positive social lives. In fact, they’re not as healthy as other teens, and one can reasonably infer that they have hard lives without much parental oversight. Interestingly, the teens who didn’t text or network *at all* were healthier than those who do.
It would be nice to be able to read the whole study, but I couldn’t find it. Here’s the abstract: http://apha.confex.com/apha/138am/webprogram/Paper224927.html.
I too was unhappy with the media reports suggesting that the texting somehow caused the higher levels of binge drinking, illicit drug use, physical fights, and risky (multiple partners) sex, rather than indicating the messaging excess be a part of, and indicative a broader spectrum impulse control disorder, but Dr. Grohol is displaying ignorance, and apparently fraudulent reporting when he fails to note the overall very unhealthy behavior patterns of the hypertexters.
If he wishes to be one of the “touchy-feely” psychologists who befriends teens at the expense of their welfare and maybe their very lives, he should at least keep it out of print. Or, maybe he would like to familiarize himself with the volumes of research by investigators such as Dr David Comings and colleagues, who will explain that the causality lies in underlying genetic anomalies related to such conditions such as ADHD, Conduct Disorder, ODD, OCD, alcohol and other substance Dependencies, as well as pathological gambling
It would be wise to check out a report in the Nov. 15 online report in the journal, Pediatrics, showing nearly the same associations with excessive video gaming, including the increased likelihood that the girls were significantly more likely to have been in “serious fights”, and to carry weapons to school. Some “positive social life”!! I would also suggest looking up the research on the frequency of the 7R variant of the DRD4 gene in those who display the extreme behaviors described in the Dr. Scott paper and in the Pediatrics report.