Abstract
Digital media availability has surged over the past decade. Because of a lack of comprehensive measurement tools, this rapid growth in access to digital media is accompanied by a scarcity of research examining the family media context and sociocognitive outcomes. There is also little cross-cultural research in families with young children. Modern media are mobile, interactive, and often short in duration, making them difficult to remember when caregivers respond to surveys about media use. The Comprehensive Assessment of Family Media Exposure (CAFE) Consortium has developed a novel tool to measure household media use through a web-based questionnaire, time-use diary, and passive-sensing app installed on family mobile devices. The goal of developing a comprehensive assessment of family media exposure was to take into account the contextual factors of media use and improve upon the limitations of existing self-report measures, while creating a consistent, scalable, and cost-effective tool. The CAFE tool captures the content and context of early media exposure and addresses the limitations of prior media measurement approaches. Preliminary data collected using this measure have been integrated into a shared visualization platform. In this perspective article, we take a tools-of-the-trade approach (Oakes, 2010) to describe four challenges associated with measuring household media exposure in families with young children: measuring attitudes and practices; capturing content and context; measuring short bursts of mobile device usage; and integrating data to capture the complexity of household media usage. We illustrate how each of these challenges can be addressed with preliminary data collected with the CAFE tool and visualized on our dashboard. We conclude with future directions including plans to test reliability, validity, and generalizability of these measures.
Highlights
Young children are immersed in the digital world
While relatively few studies consider the impact of either content or context during early childhood, even fewer studies have investigated the interaction between these factors
We have successfully applied a synergistic approach to developing the Comprehensive Assessment of Family Media Exposure (CAFE) tool
Summary
Young children are immersed in the digital world. In the United States, Rideout (2017) used what was widely considered the standard approach to measure media usage, conducting a nationally representative survey of retrospective parent-reported screen time (i.e., the time children are intentionally exposed to screens per day). While relatively few studies consider the impact of either content or context during early childhood, even fewer studies have investigated the interaction between these factors This is illustrated in a 2017 systematic review of research on screen time and cognitive outcomes (Kostyrka-Allchorne et al, 2017), which included 39 cross-sectional and longitudinal studies of screen time during early childhood (0–5 years). There is currently no standardized, systematic, scalable, and cost-effective measurement tool that comprehensively and accurately captures child and household media exposure, as well as the social context surrounding exposure during the first 5 years of life The lack of such a tool represents a critical barrier for researchers who aim to describe child and family media use, identify characteristics associated with media use, evaluate associations between media use and concurrent behavior, and assess longterm developmental outcomes associated with early media use– for good or ill
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