Sensory curation: theorizing media use for sensory regulation and implications for family media conflict

ABSTRACT

Media sensory curation theory, introduced here, complements theories of informational, emotional, and relational media gratifications. Sensory curation theory conceptualizes media devices as tools people use to help maintain sensory regulation by simultaneously capturing and curbing sensory input within built and natural environments. This article explicates the theory and introduces the Child and Adult Media Sensory Curation Inventories (MediaSCIs), separate measures of child and adult media sensory behaviors and preferences. A survey of 789 parents and adult caregivers of children ages 3 to 14 revealed moderate to strong correlations between general sensory processing and media sensory curation, validating the MediaSCIs. Controlling usage time, child media sensory curation strongly predicted problematic child media use and moderately predicted adult–child media conflict, which was four times as frequent among adult–child pairs with high MediaSCI scores than with low MediaSCI scores.

Notes

1. On occasion, a person may deliberately use media to exceed their emotional comfort zone in the interest of a higher-priority goal (Knobloch, 2003). A sensory-curation example might be an adolescent with auditory and vestibular sensitivities attending an IMAX movie to spend time with friends. Using media to induce temporary sensory discomfort still allows the individual more personal agency over their overall sensory experience than would be possible in a nonmedia environment whose sensory qualities are out of the person’s control.

2. EFAs for the Adult MediaSCI and Child MediaSCI produced 1 primary factor accounting for 32% (Adult) and 47% (Child) of the variance respectively. In both analyses, there were several secondary factors with eigenvalues just above 1.00 and a small number of items loading on each, accounting for 2% to 8% of additional variance in the adult scale and 2% to 5% in the child scale. The solution with varimax rotation produced a similar pattern, with the first factor of the adult scale accounting for 20% of the variance (secondary factors 3–11%) and the first factor of the child scale accounting for 26% (secondary factors 4–10%). Thus, we conclude that there was insufficient statistical basis to argue that a multifactor solution reflects sensory curation better than a single-factor solution.

Additional information

Funding

This project was funded by the University of Michigan College of Literature, Science, and the Arts.