Screen media and non-screen media habits among preschool children in Singapore, South Korea, Japan, and Finland: Insights from an unsupervised clustering approach.

The main purpose of the research was to describe the daily screen media habits and non-screen media habits like indoor and outdoor play, and sleep of preschool children aged 2 to 6 years from Singapore, South Korea, Japan, and Finland using a content-validated online questionnaire (SMALLQ®) and unsupervised cluster analysis. Unsupervised cluster analysis on 5809 parent-reported weekday and weekend screen and non-screen media habits of preschool children from the four countries resulted in seven emergent clusters. Cluster 2 ( = 1288) or the made up 22.2% and Cluster 1 ( = 261) or the made up 4.5%, respectively represented the largest and smallest clusters among the seven clusters that were emergent from the pooled dataset. Finland was best represented by Cluster 2 and Japan was best represented by Cluster 3 (). Parents from Finland and Japan displayed greater homogeneity in terms of the screen media and non-screen media habits of preschool children than the parents from South Korea and Singapore. South Korea was best represented by Clusters 6 () and 7 (). Singapore was best represented by Clusters 4, 5, 6 and 7, and these clusters ranged from to . Future research should explore in-depth reasons for the across-country and within-country cluster characteristics of screen media and non-screen media habits among preschool children to allow for more targeted interventions.