Family Systems Theory in the Digital Age: Reifying the Digital Level of Analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Researchers are increasingly asking questions about the complex ways in which digital media transects family life for the purpose of understanding health and development. Most research in this domain is informed by theoretical models that champion the primacy of individuals (i.e., the child). However, family systems theory (FST) has long emphasized that the family unit itself, versus the child, should be the focus of study, assessment, and intervention. This paradigm remains underutilized in research related to digital media and health. The present chapter provides a primer in FST for researchers and clinicians who are interested in media. Core concepts such as holism, organization, feedback, and resilience are reviewed. These principles are contrasted with individual-focused theoretical models. The digital level of analysis is outlined as a conceptual frame of reference and ecological layer of organization that can be applied in future digital media studies. Lastly, recommendations for research, practice, and policy are provided, with an emphasis on responsible digital innovation and application of new technologies.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".