Background. Using technology is the current trend for young children due to the rapid technology development. Young children engage with technology such as I-pads, computers, tablets, televisions, multi touch screens and so on. Without any surprises, the total hours of spending times in front of the devices among young children is getting longer and longer, including watching television, playing smart phones and tablets. Surprisingly, children as young as 3 year-old managed to use devices to watch movies and play games. Thus, the prevalence of technology usage among young children had become a discussion topic among parents, educator, psychologists and policy makers. However, even though this issue has been given an attention but yet to be highlighted at the early stage until leading problems occur. Young children engage with technology easily 5 hours per day without realizing and most of them own their smartphone. Also, there were numerous debates on the technology usage on boys and girls. Boys always being perceived as heavy internet users compared to girls. However, the report from parents seemed no difference between boys and girls in terms of technology usage. In the light of these perspectives, this study aims to compare the differences in technology usage between boy and girl aged 5 and 6 in Selangor, Malaysia.

Methods. This study is a quantitative approach study and cross-sectional design is being used. A total of 400 young children (200 boys and 200 girls) were involved in this study and a multistage sampling was adopted to identify the group of respondents. To examine young children’s technology usage, the Technology Usage (TU) which developed by Carrier and her colleagues has been used. It consists of 10 items and it has high internal reliability Cronbach’s alpha .84. The data were analyzed by using Independence Samples t-test.

Results. The findings showed that there is no significant difference in technology usage between boys and girls (t = -0.52, p = 0.60). This simply means there is no difference of the amount of time spent with technology between boys and girls aged 5 and 6 in Selangor, Malaysia. The total hours of engaging with technology among young children has no different no matter they are boys or girls. However, the types of technology used between boys and girls could be different because boys are perceived as smarter in using robotic tools but girls are better in using the technology for communication purposes. Besides, previous researches have shown that boys have more positive attitude towards technology compared to girls but again no gender differences were found in terms of time spend with technology. One of the reason could be they are given equal opportunity to use technology.

Conclusions. In conclusion, an Independent Samples T-test was carried out to test the differences in technology usage between boys and girls aged 5 and 6 in Selangor, Malaysia. Results shown there is no different between technology usage among young children. The total hours spent in using technology has no difference but the types of technology usage might be different. Hence, the future researches could do a research on this.

Added-Value. Many studies have done on the negative effects of using technology among young children, but yet very scarce research focuses on the difference technology usage among young children especially in Malaysia context. This results help to change the faulty perception that boys use more technology compared to girls. Besides, educators and parents can be more alert on the technology usage among their children and also monitor them carefully before any unwanted consequences happened.

Keywords: gender differences, technology usage, young children