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Guilty by association
For starters, the vast majority of studies into screen time, smartphones and social media just look for associations. Is more screen time associated, on a statistical level, with a certain harm? This means they can tell us whether the two are correlated, but they can’t say whether the screen time is actually causing the harm.
Researchers often ask people to self-report screen time, which is unreliable – particularly if you want to distinguish between different types of screen time. This is….