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Updated: Apr 19, 2026

Assessing the Coherence of Parents' Short Narratives Regarding their Child Using the Five-Minute Speech Sample Procedure
Published on: September 19, 2019
Supportive communication with parents moderates the negative effects of electronic media use on life satisfaction
Meyran Boniel-Nissim1, Izabela Tabak, Joanna Mazur
1Department of Counseling and Human Development, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel, meyranbn@gmail.com.
Objectives:
To examine the impact of electronic media (EM) use on teenagers' life satisfaction (LS) and to assess the potential moderating effect of supportive communication with parents (SCP).
Methods:
Data were drawn from the cross-national Health Behaviour in School-aged Children (HBSC) study (2009/2010) in Canada, England, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Israel, The Netherlands, Poland and Scotland. Sample size: 53,973 students aged 11-15 years.
Results:
More hours per day spent on the computer were associated with lower LS; more EM communication with friends with higher LS. This relationship became negative if EM use reached and exceeded a certain threshold. SCP moderated the effect of EM communication with friends, but not computer use for the total sample. SCP seems to be more important than computer use or EM communication with friends for LS and it seems to buffer negative effects of EM use.
Conclusions:
Communication with parents seems to buffer the negative effects of EM use on LS during adolescence. Higher computer use was related to lower LS, but "optimal" frequency of EM communication with friends was country specific.
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