Handbook Children Media Development: 10 (Handbooks in Communication and Media) - 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

Über diesen Titel

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.

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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 children spend at home" (Lundberg, 1934, as cited in Wartella & Mazzarella, p. 181). In total Lundberg and colleagues estimated that their sample of high-school students spent 11 percent of their leisure time, or 4 hours and 40 minutes per week with radio, and another 5.5 hours per week going to movies, concerts, or listening to records for a total of a little over 10 hours per week with the mass media.

Now compare that 10 hour weekly media use figure with the amount of media use time Timmer, Eccles, and O'Brien (1985) found 50 years later in a national sample of US children. Using children's self-reports via a similar diary method to that used by Lundberg and his colleagues, Timmer, Eccles, and O'Brien found that their sample of children reported 14 hours and 14 minutes per week of television use alone. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the proliferation and penetration of media into children's daily lives resulted in yet another quantum leap in the way that children spent their leisure time. For example, current media use studies (e.g., Roberts, Foehr, & Rideout, 2005) report that 818-year-old youth spend about 6.5 hours a day with various media (e.g., television, computers, and videogames) in the home. Even babies and young children under age 6 spent an average of 2 hours per day with screen media (Rideout & Hamel, 2006).

Put simply, while media have been a part of children's leisure time since the 1910s, there has been an overall shift in the role that screen media, especially television, play during children's leisure time. This shift led not only to a quantitative change in how children spent their leisure time, but also to a qualitative shift as youth increasingly added media activities to their leisure activities that historically had taken place outside the home.

Television's Introduction into Children's Lives and Time Use

As occurred with other mass media including radio and films, the introduction of television into American life was received with ambivalence on the part of the public. Television was seen both as a utopian instrument of egalitarianism and as a destructive device capable of wreaking havoc on family life. In the words of Spigel (1992), television was a "panacea for the broken homes and hearts of wartime life," (p. 2) as well as the object that could destroy family relationships and cause massive disruptions to the smooth functioning of households. Some critics saw an opportunity to use television to keep children off the street and in their homes, strengthening the family unit and promoting education. Others worried about the impact of television on children, fearing they might imitate dangerous or socially undesirable behaviors after viewing antisocial television content, thereby becoming more aggressive or delinquent. Another concern, germane to this discussion, was simply the amount of time children were spending with television. However, these early apprehensions failed to stop television from quickly becoming a common presence in American households.

After a decade of existence as a technological curiosity, television began to catch on with Americans at the end of the Second World War. A postwar economic prosperity saw consumer spending increase by 60 percent in the five years after the end of the war (Spigel, 1992). Much of this spending went to consumer electronic appliances, including brisk sales of televisions. In 1946, televisions occupied a miniscule 0.02 percent of homes. By 1950, this had increased to 9 percent and by 1955, 65 percent of US homes held a set. Spigel (1992) notes that the adoption of television sets coincided with an increasing birth rate, as well as the rise of the middle class in America. A reemerging focus on domesticity gave rise to the notion of the nuclear family as an American ideal, where recreation and family activities were highly valued. Television was the most prominent of these family, recreational activities. Could television actually function as a glue to keep families closer? Not surprisingly, social scientists of the era, who were concerned about television's increasingly important and time-consuming role, questioned the use of this new medium and how it impacted children and families.

Assessments of television use reveal a trend of increased total home television use. Television sets were on for about six hours per day in the 1960s, increased to 7 hours by the end of the 1970s, and jumped yet again to about 8 hours at the end of the 1980s (Comstock, 1989). This should not be confused with viewing. Rather it reflects how often the television is on during the day, even when no one is watching. George Comstock (1989) noted the omnipresence of television in American homes, saying "the large number of hours that the set is on each day in the average household makes it the framework within which human interaction occurs" (p. 253).

The upsurge in television use coincides with a shift from one-set households to multi-set households. According to 2003 Census data, televisions now exist in 98.2 percent of homes. In fact, the Census revealed that there are a staggering 260 million televisions in this country, or about 2.4 televisions per home (US Census Bureau, 2006). Televisions have increasingly become a part of children's bedrooms; 68 percent of children aged 8–18 and 36 percent of children under age 6 have television sets in their own rooms (Rideout & Hamel, 2006; Rideout et al., 2003; Roberts, Foehr, & Rideout, 2005). Not surprisingly, children with television sets in their rooms tend to view more than those who have no sets in their rooms (Roberts, Foehr, & Rideout, 2005).

Did this time in front of a television actually provide a context for family contact and interaction? The answer seems to be no. In the early days of television, one-set households were far more common, leading advocates to propose that television was a unifying factor, physically bringing families together in the home to watch common programming that could be enjoyed by all. But as Spigel (1992) noted, bringing together a family to watch television did not necessarily translate into increased interactions between family members. Indeed, Maccoby (1951) found that although families did watch together, there was increased family togetherness only in the sense of family members being physically in the same room. Television did not promote much interaction in the way of talking to each other while viewing. Maccoby characterizes the viewing experience as follows:

The viewing atmosphere in most households is one of quiet absorption in the programs on the part of the family members who are present. The nature of the family social life during a program could be described as "parallel" rather than interactive, and the set does seem quite clearly to dominate family life when it is on. (p. 428)

With the increase in multi-set households, the perceived benefit of using television to bring families closer seems to have disappeared. The new household setup allows individuals to view their preferred programming apart from other family members. Rather than serving as a medium that binds people together, the increase in multi-set households may actually serve to segregate youth from their parents (Wartella & Mazzarella, 1990).

With television occupying significant parts of the child's day, what activities are given up for viewing? One study found that television use reduced the amount of time devoted to other leisure activities, including other kinds of media consumption (Riley, Cantwell, & Ruttiger, 1949). Children without access to television listened to the radio for about 30 minutes in the evening. By comparison, children with access to television viewed approximately 2 hours and 20 minutes at night and listened to the radio for about 2 minutes, which is an increase in media use of almost 2 hours. Reading also seemed to decline with the introduction of television in a community in Norwich, Great Britain: 1314–year-old viewers read about 1.75 hours per week, while non-viewers read about 2.5 hours – a 45 minute difference (Himmelweit, Oppenheim, & Vince, 1958).

The differences in media use patterns support the idea that television is a unique media form in the way that it "colonizes" leisure time, occupying time normally spent with other media or leisure activities (Sahin & Robinson, 1981). In their review of children's use of leisure time, Wartella and Mazzarella (1990) noted the early research evidence pointing to a reorganization of children's time. Rather than simply displacing other leisure-time activities such as outdoor sports, playing musical instruments, going to the movies, or listening to the radio, researchers documented an increase in the overall amount of time devoted to mass media use.

Might new technologies affect children's time in ways similar to television when it was first introduced? Recent studies suggest that new media such as computers, videogame consoles, and the Internet have failed to displace television from its perch of dominance. Roberts, Foehr, and Rideout (2005) found that levels of total media exposure, as measured by the amount of time using any individual medium (screen, audio, or print), had increased from 7 hours and 29 minutes to 8 hours and 33 minutes in the five-year span from 1999 to 2004. The increase was attributed to increased videogame and computer exposure during that time, while television remained static at just over 3 hours a day. However, in terms of media use, which takes into consideration that more than one medium may be used at the same time (e.g., reading while watching television or playing videogames while listening to music), the levels remained almost identical over the same five-year span at about 6 hours, 20 minutes. Rideout and her colleagues suggest this finding indicates a ceiling in the amount of time children can or will dedicate to using media. In other words, not only might there be a limit for time allotted to media use, but new technologies are not displacing television or other media forms in the amount of time they consume. To make room for computers and videogames, children are multitasking more frequently, spending about 26 percent of their media time with more than one medium at the same time. However, Roberts, Foehr, and Rideout (2005) did not measure cell phone or iPod use in their study, media that can be and are used at times in the absence of other media. Moreover, the overall amount of time spent using media has still increased over what was occurring when the newer technologies were not available in most children's homes.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Handbook of Children, Media, and Developmentby Sandra L. Calvert Barbara J. Wilson Copyright © 2011 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Excerpted by permission of John Wiley & Sons. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Wiley-Blackwell
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1444336940
• ISBN 13: 9781444336948
• Einband: Tapa blanda
• Anzahl der Seiten: 640
• Herausgeber: Calvert Sandra L.
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar