Handbook Children Media Development (Handbooks in Communication and Media, Band 10) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1444336940 ISBN 13: 9781444336948

Verlag: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

The Handbook of Children, Media and Development brings together an interdisciplinary group of experts in the fields of developmental psychology, developmental science, communication, and medicine to provide an authoritative, comprehensive look at the empirical research on media and media policies within the field.

• 25 newly-commissioned essays bring new research to the forefront, especially on digital media, developmental research, and public policy debates
• Includes helpful introductions to each section, a theoretical overview of the field, and a final chapter that offers a vision of future research
• Contributors include key, international authorities in the field

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Sandra L. Calvert, the Director of the Children’s Digital Media Center, is a Professor of Psychology at Georgetown University. A fellow of the American Psychological Association, she has consulted for Nickelodeon Online, Sesame Workplace, Blue's Clues, and Sega of America, to influence the development of children's television programs, Internet software, and video games. She is author of Children's Journeys through the Information Age (1999), and co-editor of Children in the Digital Age: Influences of Electronic Media on Development (2002).

Barbara J. Wilson is a Professor and Head of the Department of Speech Communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is co-author of Children, Adolescents, and the Media (2002) and three book volumes of the National Television Violence Study (1997-1998).

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Media use starts early, in the first year of life. Initial experiences are controlled by parents and caregivers, but increasingly give way to children's preferences as favorite programs and preferred modes of interaction emerge. The degree to which these experiences are a positive as well as a negative source of developmental change in the cognitive, social, and health areas is an ongoing intellectual debate with significant implications for today's society.

The Handbook of Children, Media, and Development brings together an interdisciplinary group of experts in the fields of developmental psychology, developmental science, communication, and medicine to provide an authoritative, comprehensive, up-to-date look at the empirical research on media and media policies within the field.

The Handbook of Children, Media, and Development brings together an interdisciplinary group of experts in the fields of developmental psychology, developmental science, communication, and medicine to provide an authoritative, comprehensive, up-to-date look at the empirical research on media and media policies within the field.

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The Handbook of Children, Media, and Development

By Sandra L. Calvert Barbara J. Wilson

John Wiley & Sons

Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4443-3694-8

Chapter One

Historical and Recurring Concerns about Children's Use of the Mass Media

Ellen Wartella and Michael Robb

Promises, Promises. That is what proponents of every new media technology over the past 100 or so years have made. How the movies, or radio, or television, or computers would fundamentally alter the way children learn – making children smarter at younger ages or making learning easier and more accessible to more children – have been recurring claims. Juxtaposed to these are the naysayers who decry children's time spent with media content that is morally questionable – too much sex, too much violence, too commercial. In many places this history of recurring controversies that surround the introduction of each of the mass media of the twentieth century has been recounted (Davis, 1965; Paik, 2001; Rogers, 2003; Wartella & Jennings, 2000; Wartella & Reeves, 1985).

What are the roots of the recurring historical concerns about children's use of media? Apart from the specific medium of concern, has anything about how children use media or are influenced by media changed over the past 100 years? In this chapter, we will examine these issues. Our plan is not to recount a new historical view of the controversies which have recurred. Rather, we hope to provide a slightly different angle on the nature of these recurring controversies and we suggest that some things have changed, especially since the advent of television. The dominance of television and other screen media in children's lives has been sustained longer than the dominant role of earlier technologies and the potential impact may be more powerful as well.

Time

Life events unfold over the course of time (Baltes, Reese, & Nesselroade, 1988). Who children spend time with be it parents, peers, teachers, clergy, media characters – and the context and content of that time spent provide important parameters of the health and welfare of children. Because the activities of daily life provide the knowledge, skills, and behaviors children acquire as they develop, it is no wonder that so much of parental concern focuses on how children spend their time. Are children spending enough time working on schoolwork? Are they playing too much ... or too little? Are children spending too much time watching television, playing videogames, or browsing on the computer?

Not only is children's use of time of concern to parents, it is also a public policy concern. How much time should children spend in school? At what age can children spend time unsupervised and not be thought to be neglected by their caregivers?

Since children historically have been early and eager adopters of media technologies, Wartella and Reeves (1985) argued that how much time is taken up with media is at the root of the recurring controversies about children and the media. These controversies are personal and of concern to parents, as well as public topics of recurring public discussion, debate, and regulation.

Historical Influences and Changes in Children's Use of Leisure Time

The cycle of recurring concerns about children spending time with media was set in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, during the Progressive Era from roughly 1880 to 1930. During this period, the rise of the scientific study of children, the establishment of federal social legislation to monitor the health and welfare of children, and the institutionalization of public education for children occurred (Hawes & Hiner, 1985). Clearly, there was acknowledgement that children's needs and interests were now topics to be considered by policymakers as well as parents and caregivers during this period (Cravens, 1985). In addition to attention being focused on children, a new social category of adolescence as a distinct stage in the lifecycle of human development became institutionalized and a topic of public discussion (Hawes & Hiner, 1985). Finally, during this period far-reaching technological and social changes brought about a new concept of leisure time, discretionary time when children and adolescents could choose with whom and with what to spend their free time (Somers, 1971). The automobile, movies, and radio were revolutionizing how children and adults spent their time and marked a distinct break with earlier generations (Lynd & Lynd, 1929).

Exactly how children and adolescents spent their time became a barometer of their health and welfare during this period, and the earliest scientific studies of how children spent their time emerged (Wartella & Mazzarella, 1990). In recounting the historical changes in children's use of time during the twentieth century, Wartella and Mazzarella (1990) observed that as early as the second decade of the twentieth century, there was already concern about children having too much leisure time. Moreover, their leisure time was increasingly being spent with first film, and then radio and films, and later television. The ongoing theme of concern about children's leisure time use masks a fundamental shift that occurred after the introduction of television into American life. In short, television colonized Americans' leisure time. This phenomenon is most apparent in looking at the differences in how children spent their leisure time before and after the emergence of television.

Perhaps the easiest way of demonstrating the quantitative difference in how children spent their time over the course of the twentieth century is to describe what available evidence we have on time use. An early time use study by M. M. Davis (1911), who surveyed 1,140 children aged 11 to l4 in the 1910s, found that 62 percent of these children reported going to the movies once or twice a week. By the 1930s media time use had increased due to the popularity of radio. For instance, sociologists Lundberg, Komarovsky, and McInerny (1934) conducted extensive fieldwork in Westchester County, New York, and had 795 high-school students keep a diary of their leisure time use during 1932 and early 1933. They found both social-class- and gender-based differences in the amount of leisure time youth reported: those from more economically deprived backgrounds spent more time at paid jobs outside the home and girls spent more time in domestic work than boys. Although there was a considerable amount of leisure time, most of it was not spent on media use. For instance, Lundberg and colleagues found that his suburban adolescents averaged 7 hours and 25 minutes of leisure time on weekdays and about 11 hours on weekend days. Most of this time, however, was spent away from home hanging out with friends, attending club meetings, participating in or watching sports events, going to church-related activities, or motoring. Reports of the amount of this leisure time spent with media were relatively small in that most leisure time was spent away from home. Even when at home, the number one pastime of listening to the radio did not take up vast amounts of time: "two thirds of a sample group of children spent at least one half hour listening in on everything from detective stories to the Lucky Strike Orchestra. This pursuit occupies more of the boys' time than of the girls' and takes up from 17 to 30 percent of all leisure which the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Wiley-Blackwell
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1444336940
• ISBN 13: 9781444336948
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 640
• Herausgeber: Calvert Sandra L.
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Wiley-VCH GmbH; product_safety@wiley.com; ; Boschstrasse 12; Weinheim; 69469; Deutschland