A 2010 survey split media use from media exposure

The short answer

In 2010, a national survey found that American 8- to 18-year-olds spent more than seven and a half hours a day using media, and because many used more than one medium at once, they were exposed to nearly eleven hours of media content in that time. The gap between those two numbers is itself worth remembering: a single "hours per day" figure can hide how much of that time is doubled up.

What the evidence says

The Kaiser Family Foundation published Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds on 20 January 2010, based on a nationally representative survey of 2,002 students in grades three through twelve, who completed forty-minute questionnaires in their classrooms between October 2008 and May 2009. A subsample of 702 of those students also kept a seven-day media use diary, used specifically to measure how much time was spent using more than one medium at once. The full report distinguishes "total media use," the actual hours in a day spent with media, from "total media exposure," which adds back in the overlapping time from multitasking: young people spent 7 hours 38 minutes a day using media, but were exposed to 10 hours 45 minutes of media content in that time. Both figures had risen sharply since the same team's 2004 survey, which found 6 hours 21 minutes of use and 8 hours 33 minutes of exposure.

For context

The multitasking correction makes this survey more precise than simply summing separately reported viewing, listening and browsing times, but the two headline numbers answer different questions: use describes a young person's day, exposure describes the volume of content reaching them. Neither figure separates content type, purpose or context, so a homework-adjacent search and an unrelated video watched at the same time count identically. This is also a self-report survey completed in a classroom setting, dependent on what children remember and are willing to record about their own habits, and it predates the wide household adoption of smartphones, which the report itself notes were only beginning to reshape mobile media use at the time.

A practical next step

When comparing a family's own sense of screen time against a survey figure like this, it can help to ask which of the two numbers, use or exposure, is actually being compared, since they measure different things.

• Is a quoted screen-time figure counting hours used, or hours of content exposure with multitasking added back in?
• How much of a child's media time in a typical day involves more than one screen or device at once?
• Has this figure been compared with an earlier wave of the same survey, using the same definitions?

The precise numbers from 2010 describe one national sample answering questions in one school year; the more durable lesson is methodological: any screen-time statistic is only as clear as its definition of what counts as an hour.