Determining Hand Skill Difference of Children between High Usage and Low Usage Touch-Screen Technology Groups

In 2019, the population in the Philippines is approximately 108.1 million in which smartphone users contribute to roughly 68.5% of the population [1]. Technology becomes more involved in daily life activities as it serves multiple functions and benefits. In line with this, the group of children aged 4 to 12 is considered as one of the best age groups to learn new skills as they have one of the strongest learning effects [2]. This period is an essential time of growth to learn different types of skills needed in daily life especially with the use of technology. With the majority of modern technology being touch-screens such as the aforementioned smartphones, people use their hands to interact with them. This paper determines if there is a significant difference between the two children groups of High Usage Touch-Screen Technology Group (HUTSTG) and Low Usage Touch-Screen Technology Group (LUTSTG) in their hand skill assessment scores. The dataset from Malaysia can be used to further explore the parental handling of technology usage in the Philippines. This dataset could give a glimpse of the technology usage that is available in the Philippines.

The participants of this research are pre-school children aged between 2-12 years old. Their parents were asked to complete the Children’s Hand Skills ability Questionnaire (CHSQ) about their children when they were 5-6 years old. The questionnaire is for the parents to evaluate the hand skills of their children. The children were split into two groups according to their usage of touch-screen technology: High Usage Touch-Screen Technology Group (HUTSTG) which includes children who uses touch-screen for more than two hours and Low Usage Touch-Screen Technology Group (LUTSTG) where children are using touch-screen for less than two hours. They were then assessed by an occupational therapist who conducted a performance-based assessment using Assessment of Children’s Hand Skills (ACHS). This assessment was used to analyze their hand performance in context to real-life daily activities [3].

Using the dataset gathered by N.A. Aman et al., the researchers chose to evaluate the children’s scores from the ACHS and determine whether there is a significant difference between the ACHS scores of the HUTSTG and LUTSTG. The researchers used independent two-sample t-tests with variances unknown in order to compare if there is a significant difference between the two groups. Thus, the following hypotheses were formulated:

The parameters of interest are the mean ACHS scores of the HUTSTG and LUTSTG, \(\mu_1\) and \(\mu_2\), respectively. The researchers are interested in finding the difference between them. Hence, the constructed hypotheses were:

The hypotheses were tested using independent two-sample t-tests with a confidence level of 95% in R. The raw data gathered was imported.

rawdata = read.delim("Effects-of-touch-screen-technology-usage-on-the-hand-skills-dataset.txt", header=T)
TouchScreenUsage = as.factor(rawdata$TOUCH.SCREEN.USAGE)
Scores = rawdata$COMPOSITE.SCORES.ACHS

There are two methods to know if the unknown variances assume equal values or non-equal values. One way to approach this is to compute the actual variances of the two independent group samples.

var(Scores[TouchScreenUsage=="HUTSTG"])

## [1] 1.603305

var(Scores[TouchScreenUsage=="LUTSTG"])

## [1] 3.269278

The other procedure is to draw a boxplot to analyze the distribution of data.

boxplot(
  Scores~TouchScreenUsage,
  main="Boxplot of ACHS Scores",
  xlab="Touch-Screen Usage",
  ylab="ACHS Scores", las=1
)

In both methods, it is noticeable that there is a difference between the variances of the two groups. Therefore, unequal variances are assumed. With that being said, the t-test can now be used to test for the hypotheses using:

t.test(Scores~TouchScreenUsage)

## 
##  Welch Two Sample t-test
## 
## data:  Scores by TouchScreenUsage
## t = -6.3287, df = 112.81, p-value = 5.16e-09
## alternative hypothesis: true difference in means between group HUTSTG and group LUTSTG is not equal to 0
## 95 percent confidence interval:
##  -2.292915 -1.199585
## sample estimates:
## mean in group HUTSTG mean in group LUTSTG 
##            0.9554687            2.7017187

ttest=t.test(Scores~TouchScreenUsage)
pvalue=ttest$p.value

From the information above, the p-value can be determined and its value is 5.1600134^{-9}. Since 5.1600134^{-9} \(< 0.05\), the null hypothesis is rejected. Therefore, there is sufficient evidence to support the claim that there is a difference between the ACHS scores of the HUTSTG group and LUTSTG group.

Based on the results given, it is concluded that there is a significant difference between the Assessment of Children’s Hand Skills (ACHS) scores of the High Usage Touch-Screen Technology Group (HUTSTG) and the Low Usage Touch-Screen Technology Group (LUTSTG). With this result, it could be implied that time spent in cellphones could provide an insight to the quality of tasks being conducted, which in this case is something related to hand skills. Further research must be done in order to shed light as to which of these two groups have better hand skills and capabilities and what other aspects of life are being affected in relation to the time consumed in using cellphones.