Poster #80 - Lockdown Policies and Family Media Ecology during COVID-19

• In Event: Poster Session 05

Abstract

Digital social connection became more widespread (Tibbetts et al., 2021) as public health responses to COVID-19 restricted in-person activities (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2020). Government-imposed lockdowns introduced Zoom preschool classes, and parents turned to video chatting with grandma (Strouse et al., 2021). Parents reported greater media usage for teenagers during the pandemic (e.g., Drouin et al., 2020), and findings are similar with preschoolers (Fitzpatrick et al., 2022) and infants and toddlers (Bergmann et al., 2022; Hartshorne et al., 2021). Hartshorne and colleagues (2021) suggest that changes to childcare arrangements during the pandemic were a critical driver of changes in the family media environment. However, individual families were not asked to provide information about childcare access or to provide details about the content and context of media use in their households. Research is needed to better understand how covid pandemic lockdowns impacted family media use in relation to childcare across various countries.
The Comprehensive Assessment of Family Media Exposure (CAFE) tool has been implemented internationally to observe family media ecology with multiple streams of data, including ecological momentary assessment and the Media Assessment Questionnaire (MAQ; Barr et al., 2020). Since these measures are administered remotely, researchers were able to collect data during COVID-19. Using data from Canada, Sweden, New Zealand, and the United States collected between April 2020 and March 2021, we aim to answer the question, “Were variations in lockdown policies associated with total child media usage in 2- to 5-year-old children?”
Data from CAFE Consortium sites have been collected and will be analyzed in early 2023. Waves of data collection coincided with lockdown periods. Since lockdown policies impacted the availability of childcare, we will focus on children enrolled in childcare centers. Using parent responses in the MAQ, we will test the relationship between lockdown and screen time with a multilevel model (Table 1).
The child media usage outcome is calculated from parents recalling how much time (measured in minutes) the target child spent on each type of media on a recent typical weekday. The scores across the media types will be summed to create a total child media usage score. Additional sub-analyses will examine whether different media types (e.g. video chat vs. streaming video) varied.
We predict a positive association between lockdowns, childcare access, and total child media usage. We further predict that lockdowns and childcare access will be associated with changes in instrumental media uses. Specifically, we predict there will be fewer positive uses (promoting connection and education) and more instrumental uses (keeping children occupied or calm) early in lockdowns when pandemic stressors were more novel, but that this difference would decrease across time. Considering the association between lockdowns and screen media use will provide broader insights into how media use supports families who experience restricted childcare access beyond the pandemic.

Authors

• Douglas Piper, Georgetown University
  Presenting Author

• Bolim Suh, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Annette Sundqvist, Linköpings universitet

• Felix Sebastian Koch

• Caroline Fitzpatrick, Université de Sherbrooke

• Cara Swit, University of Canterbury

• Sarah M Coyne, Brigham Young University

• Sarah C Kucker, Southern Methodist University

• Heather Kirkorian, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Rachel F Barr, Georgetown University