# Growing up in a digital world: A synergistic approach to understanding media use in children ages 1-8 years

> **NIH NIH P01** · GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY · 2024 · $526,578

## Abstract

Overall Project summary
Rapid growth in access to digital media is accompanied by a scarcity of research examining complex, real-time 
family media context and sociocognitive outcomes, driven in part by a lack of comprehensive measurement 
tools. To meet this challenge, the PI’s interdisciplinary research team developed a multi-method, scalable, 
cost-effective toolkit called the Comprehensive Assessment of Family Media Exposure (CAFE) Toolkit. The 
toolkit is designed to capture the content and context of early media exposure (Barr et al., 2020; Radesky et 
al., 2020a). While this toolkit represents a substantial step forward in characterizing the family media ecology, 
progress in understanding the effects of media exposure on child outcomes has also been limited by the lack 
of large and representative longitudinal datasets, the difficulty of tracking quality of content in an ever-changing 
media environment, and the lack of a mechanism to rapidly share and analyze results in a theoretically driven 
manner. To overcome these limitations in the field, the overarching goal of this Research Program 
proposal is to examine trajectories of media use - characterizing the context, content, and problematic 
uses of media - in 1200 children aged between 1 to 7 years, assessing temporal associations with emotion 
regulation and social competence using a cohort sequential design. The Research Program includes three 
longitudinal studies, collecting data in three cohorts that span the entire age range (1-3, 3-5, 5-7 year olds). 
The work described in this application will also produce research infrastructure to increase the efficiency of 
coding the quality of media content, a bottleneck in the field. Finally, the data will be integrated, shared, 
visualized and analyzed in a shared analytic research hub. The proposed research is significant because it 
would be the first synergistic effort to utilize a comprehensive assessment of the family media ecology in a 
large, diverse, longitudinal sample to identify antecedents of problematic media use in early childhood as well 
as specific media use patterns that support social and emotional development in early childhood. The 
proposed work is innovative because it (1) uses a multi-method, comprehensive assessment of the family 
media ecology; (2) applies an ecological lens to study media effects and socio-emotional development within 
the family system; (3) maximizes impact and efficiency with synergistic science; (4) streamlines content coding 
in an ever-changing media environment; and (5) builds a collaborative platform for cleaning, integrating, and 
analyzing shared data for reuse.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10913316
- **Project number:** 5P01HD109907-03
- **Recipient organization:** GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY
- **Principal Investigator:** RACHEL F. BARR
- **Activity code:** P01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2024
- **Award amount:** $526,578
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2022-09-09 → 2026-08-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10913316

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10913316, Growing up in a digital world: A synergistic approach to understanding media use in children ages 1-8 years (5P01HD109907-03). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-26 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10913316. Licensed CC0.

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