EYES UP - EarlY Exposure to Screens and Unequal Performance

There is a heated debate about early access to digital media by children/adolescents. In the meantime, early access to the Internet is more and more common. Simultaneously, evidence is emerging that digital media practices during childhood/adolescence constitute a new dimension of social inequality: autonomous access to the Internet is anticipated especially among deprived families, and problematic digital media use is more likely to manifest in these families. However, empirical results on the relationship between early digital media use and wellbeing in the long-run are scarce. Also, there is an urgent need to gather robust empirical evidence about how early access to permanent connection interacts with social inequality in the lives of youths. To fill these gaps, we aim to robustly estimate the impact of an early autonomous access to digital devices on learning outcomes of high school students, and its interaction with gender, migratory background and parental education. The INVALSI institute collects data on students’ outcomes and makes it possible to follow the entire school careers of current 10th and 11th graders. We merge ad-hoc retrospective survey data about screen use during childhood/early adolescence with students’ longitudinal learning outcomes. We conduct longitudinal analysis on a dataset with about 6700 Italian high school students. Preliminary results confirm that early digital use is more likely in socio-economically deprived families and age of smartphone ownership has a negative impact on school learning outcomes for those with pre-existing habits of intensive media use. The paper discusses the implications on digital inequality.