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How Do Modern Technologies Impact Family Life? What Are Effective Strategies To Mediate The Effects?

How Do Modern Technologies Impact Family Life? What Are Effective Strategies To Mediate The Effects? published on

Both parents and children wish for less technology to interfere with their family matters and agree on certain effective strategies to achieve this.

This study is based on survey conducted with 249 families across 40 U.S. states, asking them about their opinions on the role and use of modern ICT technologies such as smart phones, tablets and their connection to social networks, in a family context. In their questions, the researchers put a particular emphasis on family-established technology rules and their respective effectiveness. Leading into the results on respective effectiveness, the researchers found that both parents and children acknowledge the need for rules around technologies in general as well as in particular contexts. While parents worries mostly about negative developmental effects (“they just cannot put it down”) and content related issues (no graphic images etc.), children particularly disagreed with parental practices of over-sharing information about them that they deemed private (childhood pictures, videos etc.). The rules reported in the study could roughly be divided into two broad categories: activity constraints (explicit rules against certain activities such as the sharing of nude pictures, the use of certain social media etc.) and context constraints (contextual rules such as homework first, then computer games, no texting at the table etc.). With regards to effective rules, the researchers found that collaborative creation of rules, based on shared ideological understanding and principles of fairness produces better rule-adherence in general. Nevertheless, regardless of perceived fairness of respective rules, they also found that children are significantly worse at following context constraints than they are at following activity constraints.

Original Source:
Hiniker, Alexis, Sarita Y. Schoenebeck, and Julie A. Kientz. Not at the Dinner Table: Parents’ and Children’s Perspectives on Family Technology Rules. Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing. ACM, 2016
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2819940
http://media.wix.com/ugd/a0f093_3ca344c37a2a4271a32a8670eeec5abf.pdf