Peer-Reviewed Study

A Retrospective Study of Life Skills Promotes Healthy Internet Use Among Adolescents

Oct 2023 🇮🇳 Journal of Family Medicine and Primary Care PEER-REVIEWED

This Journal of Family Medicine and Primary Care study, co-authored by Manoj Kumar Sharma, followed 352 Indian adolescents from mid-2021 to late 2022 to examine how life skills relate to technology use and mood in the post-pandemic period. The authors report that more than half of participants showed moderate patterns of internet or smartphone use consistent with problematic use on screening measures, and that roughly three-quarters showed mild-to-moderate depressive symptoms. Stronger life-skills scores were associated with lower technology-use severity, and class level and life-skills scores were both associated with depressive-symptom levels. The authors argue that structured life-skills training in schools and colleges could serve as a protective, preventive measure against dysfunctional internet use and related mood difficulties. TechKids Foundation cites this as evidence supporting school-based, skills-focused prevention rather than restriction alone.

352 adolescents followed, July 2021–October 2022

Retrospective cohort of Indian adolescents assessed for internet/smartphone use severity, life-skills scores, and depressive symptoms during the post-pandemic period.

More than half showed moderate Internet/smartphone use severity

Screening measures classified over 50% of the adolescent sample as moderately addicted to internet and smartphone use.

~75% showed mild-to-moderate depressive symptoms

Approximately three-quarters of participants scored in the mild-to-moderate range on depression screening, associated with class level and life-skills scores.

VIEW SOURCE →
CITATION

Ramakrishna, Satish Kumar, Mysore Narasimha Vranda, Manoj Kumar Sharma, Gobinda Majhi, Duraimurukan Gunasekaren, and Radhakrishna Vasanthra Cicil. "A Retrospective Study of Life Skills Promotes Healthy Internet Use Among Adolescents." Journal of Family Medicine and Primary Care 12, no. 10 (2023): 2307–2312. https://doi.org/10.4103/jfmpc.jfmpc_279_23

REPORT A PROBLEM WITH THIS ENTRY

RELATED EVIDENCE

Talk

Reporter Details Dark Inner Workings of Facebook — Jeff Horwitz at Harvard Kennedy School

In November 2021, weeks after the Facebook Files series ran, Jeff Horwitz discussed the 14-part investigation at a Harvard Kennedy School event moderated by professor Latanya Sweeney, covered by The Harvard Gazette. Horwitz recounted internal research in which the company's own staff associated Instagram use with worsened mental health for a share of teen girls; Facebook publicly stressed that the research was noncausal, a caveat Horwitz accepted while arguing it still represented 'the company's best understanding of reality.' He also described mitigation tools — such as limiting reshares and slowing the spread of the fastest-moving posts — that he said had already been built internally but were left undeployed. TechKids Foundation cites this as the lead reporter's own extended public account of the investigation, delivered at an academic forum, not as an independent study.

Nov 2021 🇺🇸 Harvard Kennedy School / The Harvard Gazette
Talk

What Leaked Internal Documents Reveal About the Damage Facebook Has Caused (Fresh Air Interview)

In this September 23, 2021 Fresh Air interview, Terry Gross talks with Jeff Horwitz days after his Facebook Files series ran, in his own words rather than through the articles. Horwitz describes internal research in which the company's own staff associated Instagram with worsened body image for a share of teen girls — including a presentation to executives stating the platform made body-image issues worse for one in three teen girls reporting the issue — and internal findings in which some teen users who reported thoughts of self-harm traced those feelings to their Instagram experience. These are company-attributed associations from leaked research, not independent clinical findings. Horwitz also describes Facebook's public response, which characterized the research as small-effect and inconclusive. TechKids Foundation cites this as the lead reporter's own long-form account of what the leaked documents did and did not show.

Sep 2021 🇺🇸 NPR (Fresh Air)
Talk

The Inside Story of How Silicon Valley Rewired Our Brains — Offline with Jon Favreau

Two days before The Chaos Machine published, Max Fisher joined Jon Favreau's Offline podcast for a long-form conversation about what his interviews with researchers, psychologists, whistleblowers, and Silicon Valley executives suggested about social media's effects on attention, culture, and politics. Fisher walks through the arc his book traces — from the creation of the Facebook newsfeed to the 2016 U.S. election — and argues that the pattern of harms he documented abroad is linked to the platforms' structural, engagement-maximizing design rather than to isolated bad actors. The discussion focuses on how ranking systems that reward outrage are associated with shifts in what users see, share, and believe. TechKids Foundation includes this episode as Fisher's most extended launch-week interview aimed at a general audience.

Sep 2022 🇺🇸 Crooked Media
Talk

The Chaos Machine: How Social Media Rewired Our Brains and Our World — The Rich Roll Podcast #703

In this two-hour-plus episode of The Rich Roll Podcast, Max Fisher discusses the reporting behind The Chaos Machine: how he came to cover social media as an international-affairs story, the ways he argues algorithmic feeds are associated with shifts in users' moral judgments and tolerance for outrage, and research he cites linking recommendation systems to greater acceptance of misinformation and, in volatile settings, susceptibility to violence. Fisher describes engagement-driven design as functioning like a habit-forming product, and the conversation closes with practical strategies for reducing exposure — from disabling algorithmic feeds to muting engagement metrics. TechKids Foundation includes this episode because it pairs Fisher's investigative findings with the kind of concrete, family-usable mitigation steps the library's solutions tag exists to surface.

Sep 2022 🇺🇸 The Rich Roll Podcast
Talk

Numlock Sunday: Max Fisher on The Chaos Machine

In this Numlock Sunday edition, data-journalism newsletter author Walt Hickey interviews Max Fisher about The Chaos Machine, with the full conversation published as a transcript. Fisher walks through the quantitative research he leans on most, including a large deactivation experiment in which people who stayed off Facebook for four weeks reported wellbeing gains he characterizes as roughly a third the effect of going to therapy, alongside meaningful reductions in political polarization. He describes engagement mechanics modeled on intermittent rewards, and connects the amplification of outrage content to the real-world cases — Myanmar, Sri Lanka — from his reporting. Because it is text, the interview doubles as a citable, quotable digest of the book's evidence. TechKids Foundation includes it as the most data-forward of Fisher's launch interviews.

Sep 2022 🇺🇸 Numlock News
Video

Le temps passé par les enfants devant les écrans est « hors normes, extravagant » (France Inter grand entretien)

Two months after La Fabrique du crétin digital was published, Michel Desmurget was the morning grand entretien guest on France Inter, France's most-listened-to public radio station, interviewed by Nicolas Demorand. The INSERM neuroscience research director calls the time French children now spend on recreational screens « hors normes, extravagant » — outside all norms — and walks through the associations his book draws from published research: heavier recreational screen use tracking with weaker language development, poorer concentration, lower school results, and shorter sleep. Desmurget's deliberately alarmist framing — a « fabrique du crétin » — is his own rhetoric, not a clinical finding, and the interview shows how that framing carried his synthesis into France's mainstream morning-news audience. TechKids includes it as the flagship French broadcast interview for the book, alongside the print interviews the same autumn.

Oct 2019 🇫🇷 France Inter (Radio France)
STAY CURRENT

Get new evidence in your inbox.

A weekly digest of what we added — studies, laws, films, hearings. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.

SUBSCRIPTIONS PENDING — BUTTONDOWN ACCOUNT NOT CONNECTED

OR FOLLOW THE RSS FEED →