Challenging the Association Between Screen Time and Cognitive Development —Reply

In Reply We appreciate the opportunity to engage in scholarly discussion surrounding our contribution to JAMA Pediatrics on screen time and children ’s development. Ophir et al state that “all between-person associations were not significant.” This is incorrect because the confidence interval for the between-person association does not include zero. They also cite that the “within-person cross-lags were negligible.” We agree that these effect sizes, while significant, are small in magnitude. This is not surprising when one considers that the random-intercepts cross-lag panel model conservatively estimates the putatively causal influences of longitudinal associations by isolating the within-person directional association after ext racting the temporal stability of constructs, as well as traitlike individual differences. Moreover, child development is multiply determined and single sources of influence rarely produce large effects. Ophir et al also suggest an analysis that contrasts complete cases vs those who have missing val ues. It is well documented that listwise deletion produces results that are more biased than statistical estimation procedures for handling missing data. Accordingly, we used full information maximum likelihood estimation. In addition, Ophir et al request a statistical comparison of the direction of cross-lags (screens to milestones vs milestones to screens). As they note, the overlapping confidence intervals indicate that cross-lags are not sig...
Source: JAMA Pediatrics - Category: Pediatrics Source Type: research