Effects of Playing with Gadget on Elementary School Children in Urban and Rural Environment

Background: The existence of gadget is like the two sides of a coin. On one side, it brings benefits to our life, but on the other side, it facilitates negative behaviour impacts to its users, and the patterns for rural children may be different than those of urban. Objective: This study aimed to investigate the negative behaviour effect of playing gadget of elementary school children in urban and rural areas of Malang, Indonesia. Method: Information regarding characteristic of playing gadget and behaviour were collected via a self-administered questionnaire from Januari to June, 2017. This study included 355 subjects of urban and rural elementary school chidren aged 7-11 y.o in Malang, East Java, Indonesia. Result: A total of 100% of subjects reported to be using gadgets, the mean (+/- SD) of age start using gadget was 2.63+0.548 y.o Overall, 3.4% subjects had started using gadget in less than 2 y.o, 29.9% subjects had started using gadget in 2 until 5 y.o, and 66.8% were more than 5 y.o. In addition, 13.5% of the subjects reported > 2 hours/day of total gadgets usage duration, exceeding the international recommendation of < 2 hours/day of screen time. The statistically data (logistic multinomial regression) show that earlier age using gadget especially watching movies had negative impact in behaviour (p < 0.000) than playing games. Conclusion: This suggests that, the trend of earlier using gadget which may contribute to negative behaviour, is found to be prevalent in urban (26.3%) than rural areas (13.6%). Both residence and age start using gadget statistically significant affect the child's negative behavior (p 0.040; p<0.000).