IBS Seminar Series: Children’s Technology Use, Health Lifestyles, and the Reproduction of Inequality.

Stefanie Mollborn

Title: Children's Technology Use, Health Lifestyles, and the Reproduction of Inequality.

Abstract: Relatively little is known about children’s technology use in the mobile technology era or about how current patterns of technology use relate to other aspects of health lifestyles, such as physical activity or sleep, in early life. Technology use is a rapidly evolving and highly prevalent health behavior. Information about its long-term effects is sparse and mixed, and parenting norms around it are in flux. Stefanie Mollborn will present results in progress from a mixed-methods, NSF-funded project that combines nationally representative survey and time diary data on health lifestyles and technology use across the early life course with multimethod qualitative data following families with elementary-aged children as the children transition into middle school.

Bio: Stefanie Mollborn is a Professor in the IBS Health & Society Program and the Department of Sociology, and is training director at IBS. She studies norms and social inequalities in the early life course. Her work focuses on the U.S. context and combines statistical analyses of longitudinal population surveys with qualitative analyses of in-depth interviews. She received a Ph.D. in Sociology from Stanford University in 2006. Her 2017 book, Mixed Messages: Norms and Social Control Around Teen Sex and Pregnancy, is available from Oxford University Press. Mollborn’s most recent mixed-methods research continues a focus on social norms in the case of health lifestyles among children and teens, with a particular emphasis on their use of technology in the mobile internet era.