Peer-Reviewed Study

Placing Problematic Media Use in Context: A Research Synthesis, Person-Centric Framework, and Chart Review Among a Clinical Sample of US Youth

Sep 2025 🇺🇸 Frontiers in Psychiatry PEER-REVIEWED

In this Frontiers in Psychiatry paper, Michael Carter, Michael Rich, and Digital Wellness Lab colleagues review 205 patient charts from the lab's own clinic for problematic interactive media use to build a person-context-process-outcome-time (PC-POT) framework. Rather than defining problematic media use as any one behavior — gaming, pornography, social media, or general internet use — the model treats it as a pattern that develops gradually, shaped by a young person's individual traits, their surrounding context (family, school, peers), and life transitions, and that can affect functioning across several life domains at once. The authors present this as a more clinically useful lens than screen-time thresholds alone, intended to help clinicians identify which co-occurring factors are driving a given case. TechKids Foundation cites it as a direct look inside the clinical population Rich's lab treats and the framework it uses to make sense of those cases.

205 patient charts reviewed

The chart-review portion of the study drew on 205 records from a U.S. clinical sample of youth seen for problematic interactive media use.

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CITATION

Carter, Michael C., Nicole Powell, Benoit Bediou, Michael Tsappis, David Bickham, and Michael Rich. "Placing Problematic Media Use in Context: A Research Synthesis, Person-Centric Framework, and Chart Review Among a Clinical Sample of US Youth." Frontiers in Psychiatry 16 (September 30, 2025): 1574502. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2025.1574502

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