Of the people who responded, 3,425 completed all the surveys and could be included in the study (side-note: there's a typo in the abstract)pic.twitter.com/chqRAEjUbh
Epidemiologist. Writer (Guardian, Observer etc). "Well known research trouble-maker". PhDing at @UoW Host of @senscipod Email gidmk.healthnerd@gmail.com he/him
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Of the people who responded, 3,425 completed all the surveys and could be included in the study (side-note: there's a typo in the abstract)pic.twitter.com/chqRAEjUbh
The study then dichotomized (made into two groups) the participants by whether they used their phones "problematically" or not - something of a subjective diagnosis, but not too badpic.twitter.com/dZ4cfam3Ou
They then ran a series of comparisons looking at whether the problematic users were different from non-problematic users They found that problematic users had worse grades, more alcohol abuse (just), and banged more people on average
The thing is, this study has ~dozens~ of limitations/drawbackspic.twitter.com/RtraFjOk6L
For one thing, the sample is hopelessly biased. Think about university students who'll willingly do a 156-question survey for free online instead of literally anything else
Then, think about what happens if you only include the people who answer every question. That's taking a biased sample to a whole new level
It's also cross sectional in design, which means that people just answered a single survey, and there was absolutely no control for confounding That means you can't infer any causality whatsoeverpic.twitter.com/bM2UtCekgW
Does mobile phone use cause banging? Does banging cause mobile phone use? Does heavy alcohol use, or some third unmeasured thing, cause both? We have absolutely no ideapic.twitter.com/I9cwpmUPaf
This type of study is great in that it is easy to do and very cheap, but it's bad in that the information you can take home from it is virtually nothing at all
In other words, what this study showed is that, in a highly self-selected group of university students, using smartphones a bunch was slightly correlated with poor health
If that sounds like a boring, slightly meaningless finding, that's because IT IS
Especially when you consider that "problematic" smartphone users answered yes to questions like these...pic.twitter.com/BilLivbXgO
News sites love studies bagging out smartphones, because they're still new and scary, but it still seems pretty unlikely that they're actually causing people to get laid/depressed/alcoholism
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