You know, opinions are valuable here for hypothesis generation.
No one knows and there is no consensus why this is happening. I have a few opinions as a middle-and-high school teacher. But talking about this is important to help wrap our heads around it.
If a definitive understanding or reason were easy to acquire, we'd have done it already. So, the toil continues: for researchers, policymakers, laymen... and those of us in the trenches trying to do something about it with not enough information.
There are for quite some time already studies happening so I doubt that random people on the internet sharing opinions help much in generating valid (or interesting) hypotheses. Also how would you validate those?
A few observational studies are fairly meaningless-- they don't establish causation, etc. Your meta-analysis highlights as such.
Discussion, speculation, and reasoning about problems are valuable-- even if the process does often lead us astray.
Do you ever talk about things that you are not an expert on or that aren't settled? E.g. You made some comments about team culture a few days ago-- ignoring the massive body of literature about conflict in teams and engaging in speculation based upon personal opinion.
I'm a teacher at a school where neither COVID "lockdown" nor excessive social media use would be a great explanation for poor student mental health, but still there has been a significant increase in problems in the past few years. Should I just ignore the problem and hope research pins it down and solves it? I need to make reasonable guesses and act upon them.
I did not say, that I evaluated the studies. I just wanted to exemplify that with very little effort one could find studies. I don't think it is my job to evaluate every study on any subject.
If I were interested in the details and interested in discussing the actual content (not the meta layer of discussion quality) I would first look at meta studies and see were they lead me, though.
So sorry for posting examples that there are studies without the disclaimer, that I did not check the strength of any of those.
No one knows and there is no consensus why this is happening. I have a few opinions as a middle-and-high school teacher. But talking about this is important to help wrap our heads around it.
If a definitive understanding or reason were easy to acquire, we'd have done it already. So, the toil continues: for researchers, policymakers, laymen... and those of us in the trenches trying to do something about it with not enough information.