V. Language Development: Parental Questionnaire for Quantity and Quality of Media Screens in Early Education and Development (QQ-MediaSEED)

Background

QQ-MediaSEED was developed as parental questionnaire to capture the quantity and quality of screen media usage by bilingual children in Singapore. This questionnaire focuses both the quantity and quality of the digital media use by the children. Quantity in the context of digital screen media is typically measured on an individual level by the number of hours spent using screen -based digital media devices (Sun & Yin, 2020; Fitzpatrick et al., 2021); as well as the frequency of usage (Chang et al., 2018). Quality of the digital media used looked into the three overarching themes for digital media i.e., the content, design and use. QQ-MediaSEED has three sections comprising of children’s demographic (e.g., age, gender), digital media use and parental mediation. QQ-MediaSEED is distinguishable from the existing instruments in three main area. First, QQ-MediaSEED focused on children’s use of interactive screen media, with the response drawn from their parents. Secondly, the questions of QQ-MediaSEED allows to highlight implications from the quantity and quality of children’s digital screen media usage. Thirdly, unlike other surveys the questions in QQ-MediaSEED engages with bilingualism to reflect the language context in Singapore and internationally. This questionnaire offers more comprehensive coverage of issues related to the quantity and quality of children’s digital screen media use concerning multiple stakeholders.

Abstract

The quantity and quality of children's digital screen media exposure is an emerging area of early childhood studies because of its strong social relevance, and this has been particularly true since the COVID-19 pandemic. The few existing parental questionnaires on children's digital screen media exposure mainly focus on monolingual children's media habits and address either the quantity or quality of children's media exposure. Inspired by the existing instruments, this study introduces a new parental questionnaire to comprehensively assess the duration, frequency, content, design, and use of bilingual children's digital screen media exposure at home, before and since the COVID-19 pandemic. Focus group discussions and the first wave of our data collection on 141, 3–6 years old Singaporean bilingual children indicate good face validity and internal consistency of the parental questionnaire. Results reveal substantial differences in children’s quantity and quality of daily digital screen media exposure, as well as the discrepancies in their digital media habits between English and their mother tongue languages, before and since the COVID-19 pandemic.

Scales and Subscales

QQ-MediaSEED has 3 subscales: Demographics containing questions on demographic and child’s general environment (30 items); Digital Media Use focuses on children’s digital media use at home (14 items) and Parental Mediation focuses on parental mediation of children’s digital media use at home (7 items).

Citation

Sun, H., Lim, V., Low, J., & Kee, S. (2022). The Development of a Parental Questionnaire (QQ-MediaSEED) on Bilingual Children’s Quantity and Quality of Digital                Media Use at Home. Acta Psychologica, 229, 103668.