How digital screen education affects adolescents` physical and mental health? Cross-sectional research.

Mariyana Daskalova, Ralitsa Raycheva

Keywords: adolescent, digital screen, education, health

Background:

Workplaces with digital screens determine well known risks to health: in terms of vision, musculoskeletal disorders (back pain), mental stress, etc. Health promotion and disease prevention is an essential in general practice.
The aim of the research is to investigate the impact and relationship between digital screen education and adolescents` physical and mental health. The survey compares two groups of adolescents from a language high school. The first group studying from paper textbooks only (41 participants), the other - studying without paper books, using digital screen devices (60 participants). The curriculum is one and the same for both groups, exposed to these environmental and working conditions (common for the groups, except the kind of their study materials: paper or digital) during the educational course (four to five years).

Research questions:

How digital screen education affects adolescents` physical and mental health?

Method:

Anonymous Google Form questionnaire, including closed and partially categorized questions, sent by e-mail to the students from 11-th and 12-th grade (average 300 students). Simple random sampling included 101 who submitted answers.

Results:

The results indicate that the two groups do not differ significantly in terms of the compared indicators (wearing dioptric glasses/contact lenses, having blurry vision/dry eyes, spending time outdoors, practicing sports/other physical activities, back pain, weight). A statistically significant difference is reported when it comes to the average school grades. Students using paper books tend to achieve higher school grades.

Conclusions:

In our study we conclude that digital education is not a crucial factor in the adolescents’ health. In the light of the WHO definition of mental health as a state of mental well-being that enables people to realize their abilities, learn well and work well, it can be concluded that presenting information via paper-based sources is useful in the course of the learning process.

Points for discussion:

#60