Public conversations about “screen time” in adolescence often start and end with worry that time online must be stealing attention from school. Our newly published paper asks a different question: What if some of that unstructured time on social media, video games, and general web browsing builds skills that help students do better in school?

Synthesizing fifty-six experimental studies of the “Proteus effect” (meta-analysis), we examined what conditions make the proteus effect stronger rather than whether or not it exists. The cautious answer: the Proteus effect is robust but probably a bit smaller than headline estimates, and still stronger in VR.

This write-up adds a much-needed update to Muller et al.’s (1999), “how to use SPSS to study ego-centered networks” by reviewing the process of restructuring and transposing name generator survey data in SPSS. Key takeaways: (1) prep your data with a simple, sequential naming scheme, (2) restructure “variables into cases” and ensure your named variable groups are those which need to be transposed, (3) categorize key ego-level variables as “fixed” and generate a cluster ID (index) variable to help with MLM analysis, and, lastly, (4) save the restructuring command in SPSS syntax to verify and ensure all steps were completed correctly. Good luck!

The COVID-19 pandemic rapidly changed how Americans viewed the importance of broadband Internet connectivity. In a short period of time, a national emergency shifted how and where people accessed work and education, how they interacted with friends and family, and how they spent their time. An inadequate infrastructure for broadband access left rural Americans and particularly rural youth at higher risk.

This study assessed the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on home Internet connectivity, student achievement, and adolescent well-being. The focus is on middle and high school students enrolled in rural and small-town schools.