BlogDogIt

Source: The Skeptical Dad

There was a flutter of activity across Twitter and blogs the other day, in response to some reports that suggested kids’ increasing TV viewing was having a detrimental effect on mental health. According to the reports, TV viewing should be limited for children even into their teens and banned altogether for under-threes. The issues highlighted here will be familiar to detractors of Bad Science and Bad Reporting, but I wanted to record some thoughts for posterity.

I first saw the story in The Guardian and it was also picked up by BBC News, The Independent, The Telegraph, Daily Mail, Metro and many other outlets. Whilst it’s an interesting and worthwhile area of study, the paper published in the journal Archives Of Disease In Childhood and the subsequent press statements, had a few problems that undermine the stark headlines.

The paper was not an original research paper, but an opinion piece that looked back at some previous research. The chief agitator in this is Aric Sigman, a psychologist whose method of ‘cherry-picking’ evidence Ben Goldacre has had much to say about in the past. ‘Cherry-picking’ is essentially picking the bits of evidence that support a particular claim, whilst ignoring other evidence that doesn’t. As Goldacre points out, a better way to analyse previous research is to perform a ‘systematic review‘. These reviews say exactly how the literature was searched and compiled, which means it is more free from bias and allows others to reproduce it.

As for this specific case, Pete Etchells at SciLogs does a good job at highlighting the problems with the selective nature of the analysis and why it’s important to understand the cause of something before issuing guidance on fixes. I worry that many developmental outcomes – such as empathy, attention, educational performance – are lumped in under the banner of ‘mental health’, but that is probably for someone more qualified to comment on. Professor Dorothy Bishop‘s remarks in the Guardian article are salient too – if Sigman’s concerns are to do with kids just sitting for long periods, you shouldn’t advocate reading books for too long.

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