Can we trust people to accurately report how much time they spend on screens in the research we conduct? The simple and sometimes frustrating answer is: no, we cannot. While we know that self-reported screen time is unreliable, the more intriguing and underexplored question is why this is the case. Together, we will unpack how media users perceive and interpret time—and why this should matter for both theory and methodology in communication research.

Although people cannot report screen time accurately, I argue that it is time to start trusting users’ perceptions either way. The time spent with screens can feel fast, empty, wasted, meaningful, or even bizarre. Early findings from our own research and related fields give us many hints that the perception of time is thus not an error, but rather a powerful concept, helping us to study the media phenomena we care about. Beyond the mere quantity of time spent, we can begin to explore the quality of the time spent with screens.

This talk invites a critical rethinking of how we conceptualize, measure, and interpret screen time—challenging our assumptions and summarizing what we have learned and still need to learn.

About the speaker

Jana Dombrowski has been a research assistant at the Department of Media Psychology at the University of Hohenheim (Stuttgart, Germany) since December 2021. As part of her PhD studies, she focuses on the theoretical and methodological challenges in the current debate on screen time, with a particular emphasis on the subjective perception of time. Additionally, she conducts research on social media privacy.