Peer-Reviewed Study

Unintended Positive Behavioral Changes During Self-report and Wearable Data Collection on Digital Media Use in Young Adults

Oct 2025 🇰🇷 Journal of Behavioral Addictions PEER-REVIEWED

This Journal of Behavioral Addictions paper, co-authored by Hae Kook Lee, tracked 206 young adults over four weeks who were simply asked to self-report their digital-media use and wear a Fitbit, with no other intervention applied. The authors report that participants' digital-media use and high-risk-use scores dropped, and depressive symptoms eased, over the study period even though nothing was designed to change their behavior. They interpret this as a measurement effect: the act of tracking and reporting one's own screen habits appears itself to nudge people toward lighter use, at least temporarily. The authors caution that future studies testing digital-media interventions need control groups that also self-monitor, since a real intervention's effect could otherwise look larger than it actually is, simply because measurement alone moves the numbers. TechKids Foundation cites this as a methodological caution relevant to how gaming- and screen-use interventions are evaluated.

Digital-media-use score improved despite no intervention, p = 0.031

Across 206 young adults, high-risk digital-media-use scores and depressive symptoms both improved over four weeks of self-report and wearable data collection with no behavioral intervention applied, which the authors attribute to a measurement effect rather than a true treatment effect.

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CITATION

Jo, Sun-Jin, Hae Kook Lee, Sun Jung Kwon, Yena Kim, Jae Seok Kwak, and Haejung Lee. "Unintended Positive Behavioral Changes During Self-report and Wearable Data Collection on Digital Media Use in Young Adults." Journal of Behavioral Addictions 14, no. 4 (2025): 1619–1624. https://doi.org/10.1556/2006.2025.00082

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