Study: Schoolwide phone bans show no significant impact on mental health
jamanetwork.com32 points by giuliomagnifico 2 days ago
32 points by giuliomagnifico 2 days ago
It seems really, really obvious to me that phones are bad for learning, mental health, social connection, etc. But nobody has been able to prove this in any studies, even in ones outside of the school environment. At some point I think we just have to do school phone bans regardless of the science.
Ok, but how about student grades? I wouldn't have expected any impact on mental health resulting from a school ban considering the exposure they get every other hour of the day.
I was thinking the same thing, the outcome they're measuring is unrelated to the reason for the instituted change.
Study: Schoolwide phone bans show no significant impact on road death toll.
If anything, it appears the bans were associated with slightly worse mental health:
> In the full sample, the estimated postpolicy association was 0.65 (95% CI, 0.01-1.30; P = .05) for depressive symptoms, 0.21 (95% CI, −0.08 to 0.50; P = .16) for anxiety, 0.23 (95% CI, −0.12 to 0.59) for hostility, and −0.52 (95% CI, −1.08 to 0.03; P = .06) for mental well-being.
> Although a small number of estimates were suggestive of worse outcomes before multiple testing correction, none remained statistically significant after prespecified correction. Results were similarly null in gender-stratified analyses.
The bans are very lackadaisically enforced, and this is in a state where the ban is actually mandated by law (Missouri). My daughter says in high school kids regularly have phones out in class. And a ban even if enforced would not keep kids off these harmful platforms for the many other hours in the day.
Why anyone would expect phone bans to improve mental health is beyond me when the majority of phone use is not happening at school.
Improve grades, improve classroom behavior, maybe. What about those?
> Analyses using a more stringent definition of school phone bans (ie, requiring phones to be stored away and not carried on the student’s person) also yielded findings consistent with the main results
I actually read it as "They're no more unhappy without than with them" . Kinda occam's razor of if they're not unhappier without their phone, then there's no harm taking it from them.
Assuming that's true, why are they more unhappy without them? Sounds akin to dependency/withdrawals at that point.
> Improve grades, improve classroom behavior, maybe. What about those?
Isn't that partly the goal with the ban? Fewer distractions.
Am I reading Table 1 correctly? It seems to indicate screen time (social media, gaming, etc) is the same between both groups (phones allowed and phones banned). Is that right?
If so, it's no wonder they see no difference. They didn't see a change in the presumed underlying cause.
The narrative says that phone use was already banned during classroom instruction in many of the schools that later instituted school-wide bans. The impact on students would've been minimal because realistically the only time they would've been able to use phones beforehand was passing between classes or at lunch/recess.
Though this is still relevant to policy-makers who are thinking of instituting district-wide bans. It's sorta like all the heat around critical race theory: banning something that doesn't actually happen much in schools.
When I was in high school in the age of the LG Chocolate, we’d come home and hop on Facebook. So this pretty much tracks. Stopping phone use in schools is probably good for grades but it can’t help whatever goes on after school.
Here is a thought. Perhaps phones are not the root issue. Look at the state of society right now. So many of us are ideologically divided to the point where people are afraid to be themselves. This is not an environment where the youth flourish.
We do most of our communicating via phones on platforms that encourage flip, nuance-free takes, are hotbeds of disinformation, and so on. Nothing about the environments we exist in foster positive, meaningful communication that collectively benefits us. Everything we used is designed to divide.
Our inability to collectively get along ramped up exponentially as smartphones took off. Phones, and the platforms within that people have become dependent upon, are the root.
Edit: Instead of getting to know people at a deep level, understanding what shapes their core views and how they view the world, and constructively communicating with them to shape their worldview over time for the better, we prefer to yell and scream at each other in 140 characters for the sake of upvotes.
Real change and progress takes time and effort, but for some reason we're collectively deluded into thinking that it'll happen via upvotes in 45 seconds and without ever having looked one another in the eye.
what about teachers' mental health?
> Conflict of Interest Disclosures: Dr Odgers reported membership on the Youth and Families Advisory Committee for YouTube.
All you need to know
It's amazing what you manage to not find when you try really hard to not find it.
Reminds me of a scene from the movie "Thank you for smoking" where Big Tobacco's lead scientist has managed to find no link between smoking and cancer for 30 years. It's a miracle!
There are studies showing whatever. Most articles about this stuff are just people cherry-picking research to fit their agenda. Positive or negative.
... for youth in Iceland aged 13 to 15 years in February 2016, February 2018, and November 2023.
Apparently they did not control for medication or supplements, such as vitamin D treatments, artificial UV light exposure, or antidepressants.
Alternate interpretation: when it's dark for half the year your mental health isn't dominated by phone access. School's probably a social, cognitive and energy highlight in the otherwise permadark day.
> they did not control for medication or supplements
The only way this would matter would be if phones were banned and then also those other interventions were withheld in order to perfectly counterbalance the expected effect of the phone ban. Do you have some evidence that Iceland suddenly decided to reduce these interventions between 2018 and 2023?
This point isn’t even mentioned in the limitations section of the study, so why are you making it? There are more significant potential limitations to this study that they did describe, including the fact that “we also lacked objective measures of in-school smartphone use and therefore could not determine whether bans reduced actual phone use”. (Though that doesn’t exactly matter either, since if the bans aren’t actually stopping phone use, then they are still ineffective, just in a different way.)
> Alternate interpretation: when it's dark for half the year your mental health isn't dominated by phone access.
This is a nonsensical interpretation that seems to me to betray a lack of understanding of statistics. The planet doesn’t experience any more or less sunlight in the winter between 2016 and 2023, so has no bearing on whether or not there would be a detectable effect from an intervention.
You're inventing a plausible-but-probably-irrelevant cause when a more likely cause is mentioned in the study: students were not using their phones a lot in school before the ban.