Media Effects on Children Research Paper

1. Impact of Media on Children’s Moral and Social Development

1.1 Media Violence

Issues about how media impact children’s moral and social development typically focus on the area of violence. Wartella and Reeves (1985) traced the history of recurring media issues, including violence, in American society. The role that films play in shaping children’s morality was a research focus of the Payne Fund in the 1920s and 1930s. Antisocial radio and comic book content also emerged as a social concern. Television, however, became the medium in which the controversy about media violence became a matter of serious and sustained public and scientific inquiry. Over the last five decades of the twentieth century, the United States Congress periodically held hearings, animated in part by public pressure to protect children and society from antisocial, aggressive behavior.

Several key theoretical models have been used to examine the impact of violent content on children’s behavior. These models included (a) culti ation theory, which examined the degree of violent content in television programs over time and how they might shape dominant and prevailing views of how much violence there was in a culture, (b) social learning or social cogniti e theory, which predicted imitation of violent acts as well as disinhibition of acts that children typically inhibit, but which are acted upon when they observe media models act aggressively with impunity, (c) arousal theory, which hypothesized that heavy viewers of violent content would become habituated and desensitized to violent content, (d) script theory, which used observational and enactive learning to explain the durability of aggressive behavior, and (e) psychoanalytic theory, which predicted decreases in children’s aggressive conduct after viewing violent media content because innate aggressive impulses were harmlessly drained off via fantasy experiences, a process known as catharsis.

Thousands of research studies have been conducted on the impact of violent media content on children, including the Surgeon General’s Report on Tele ision and Social Beha ior, published in 1972. Taken together, the results of this body of research reveal that (a) the amount of violent television content has remained steady over time, with children’s cartoons portraying the most frequent number of violent acts per episode, (b) children imitate and become disinhibited in aggressive behaviors after exposure to violent television programs, (c) children who view programs with heavy concentrations of violence become habituated and desensitized to the content, (d) aggressive effects of media are durable over time, and (e) there is little evidence of catharsis. Similar outcomes are found for the newer technologies, notably violent video and virtual reality games.

A key methodological criticism was that most studies showing a causal link between exposure to media violence and childhood aggression were conducted in laboratory, rather than in naturalistic, environments. However, field experiments using naturalistic methods of inquiry also demonstrated deleterious effects of violent content on children and so did longitudinal correlational studies. Similarly, meta-analyses, in which large numbers of studies were examined simultaneously, supported the thesis that television violence is one cause of childhood aggression.

1.2 Prosocial Media

Just as media can cultivate aggressive antisocial conduct, so too can they cultivate prosocial behaviors that can contribute to the moral development of children. Prosocial behavior includes altruistic acts such as helping, sharing, and understanding the feelings of others. Stein and Friedrich (1972) first demonstrated the potential of television to cultivate prosocial behaviors by comparing violent cartoons with prosocial content. Preschoolers who saw the violent content became more aggressive in their subsequent play while those who saw the prosocial programs increased in task persistence, delay of gratification, and rule obedience. Children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds also increased in cooperation, nurturance, and verbalization of feelings. Later studies of both commercial and public prosocial television programs demonstrated similar beneficial effects for children of all social classes. Effects were particularly pronounced when rehearsal techniques, such as verbally labeling and role playing (i.e., enacting) the prosocial messages, were utilized.

1.3 Commercial Media

Media are often commercial enterprises with the intent to sell products to users and to export programs worldwide. A commercial financial base, which characterizes American television but not that of all nations, impacts the kind of content that children have available to them. Arguments have been advanced that the increased commercialism in children’s entertainment media has undermined social values by increasing materialistic attitudes.

In the beginnings of television, industry created many educational and prosocial programs for children, in part so that families would buy a television set. Once there was a critical mass of television owners, networks began to concentrate their efforts on selling audiences to advertisers, their source of revenue. Because children are a smaller and less lucrative audience than adults, children’s programs became much less available than adult programs.

Young children are also limited by the cognitive skills that they bring to bear on media content. They believe, for instance, that commercials are there to assist them in their buying decisions. By contrast, older children increasingly understand the persuasive

intent of commercials, and many become cynical about advertised products by the end of middle childhood, although they still want many of the products. Older children have successively been taught the deceptive techniques used by commercial advertisers, but younger children do not have the cognitive capacities to understand commercial persuasive intent. Action for Children’s Television (ACT) became a major public advocacy group arguing for the regulation of advertisements in American children’s television programs. Public pressure on the American television industry during the 1970s led broadcasters to (a) limit the amount of advertising on children’s programs, (b) use commercial separators to segment the commercial from the program content, and (c) ban program hosts from selling products to children within their own program or in segments surrounding their program.

By the 1980s, however, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the American government

agency that regulates broadcast media, changed directions and instituted a deregulation policy. Children

were no longer considered a special audience in need of protection, and the market place was left to regulate itself. In that deregulatory environment, program-length commercials (or product-based programs) emerged. Program-length commercials were programs created around a product that advertisers wanted to sell to children. Most American children growing up in the 1980s viewed programs that were intimately linked to a specific product with a consumer focus rather than one that was meant to foster their development.

Moreover, the amount of time that broadcasters spent in traditional kinds of advertising to children increased.

By the 1990s, the Internet emerged as a new medium for advertising to consumers, including children. With little initial governmental regulation of Internet commercial practices, advertisers created sites where they asked children for personal information about who they were and about what kinds of buying practices they had. Favorite media characters targeted individual buyers by writing personal online messages to specific children. Environments were seamless so that it was difficult for children to tell the difference between a commercial and other kinds of content.

Public advocacy groups continued to pressure the government to regulate both the Internet and commercial television practices. The United States Congress passed the Children’s Television Act of 1990, placing time limits on the amount of commercial advertising that could take place on children’s programs, and the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, forcing American advertisers to stop soliciting on-line, personally identifying information from children. Nonetheless, it remains legal for advertisers to use cookies, an Internet tracking device that keeps detailed records of which users visit specific Internet sites.

2. Cognitive Media Effects

With the advent of each new technological innovation, predictions are made about the vast potential for educational practice to be revolutionized. These predictions remain largely unfulfilled because of the commercial nature of most media and early limitations inherent in media delivery. Nonetheless, educational innovations and successes take place with the development of new media.

Cognitive developmental approaches, such as those advanced by Bruner, and information processing theory are typically used to examine children’s learning from educational media. In cognitive developmental theory, children are thought to represent and to think about information in different ways, depending upon their stage of development. The three levels of thought are enactive representations of information with the body, iconic visual representations, and symbolic verbal representations.

The ways that children think map onto the symbol systems used to convey content by various representational media. These symbol systems, known as formal features, structure, mark, and represent content through visual and auditory production techniques such as action, sound effects, and dialogue. Radio, for instance, relies on auditory features for delivering messages whereas television relies on visual and auditory features. Because very young children tend to think in pictures as well as words, television may provide a developmentally appropriate code for them to represent and remember content in iconic and symbolic modes.

Information processing theory examines the flow of information through cognitive processes such as perception, attention, and memory of events. The perceptual attention-getting characteristics of media, such as the use of sound effects, can improve children’s attention to, and memory for, plot-relevant television content. Children’s memories of the explicitly presented content that is central to a program and children’s memories of abstract inferential content, such as character feelings, motivations, and temporal links of causal program events, are enhanced by the use of character action. While young children can remember important program events that are explicitly presented, older children have metacognitive skills that allow them to understand the abstract, inferential material as well.

Sesame Street stands out as a landmark achievement in creating effective educational television programs that children choose to view. This carefully constructed program uses production techniques, such as singing and sound effects, to carry important verbal information. Evaluations of the program suggest that advantaged and disadvantaged children learn cognitive lessons, are better prepared to enter school, and are better readers early in life. Longitudinal follow-ups reveal that adolescents who had been heavy viewers of Sesame Street as children had better grades in high school. Empirical examinations of Sesame Street also led to the development of the comprehensibility model, an approach emphasizing the active, strategic nature of children’s attention as they search for meaning in television programs (Anderson et al. 1981).

Realizing the unique appeal and promise of broadcast television as an educator of children, the United States Congress passed the Children’s Television Act of 1990. As a condition for license renewal, commercial broadcasters had to provide educational and informational programming for children, defined as content that could improve the cognitive intellectual and or social and emotional development of children aged 16 years and under. After several years, in which the educational merit of broadcaster offerings were of dubious quality, the FCC implemented the three hour rule, requiring each broadcaster to provide three hours of educational and informational programming each week.

Because of the broad definition used by the FCC in defining educational programming, most broadcasters presented prosocial rather than academic content for their educational offerings. Although children often take away social and emotional lessons from these programs, the potential of television to educate children in academic content areas as it entertains them still remains vastly underutilized in American society. Public broadcasting remains the main source of academically oriented television programs for American children.

Although other educational television programs can also enhance children’s attention and learning, most have been unable to sustain an audience or the test of time. Inherent limitations exist in educational television presentations that have been difficult to overcome. These problems include a lack of user control, the different knowledge bases of different learners, and the suppression of imaginative and creative skills. The video cassette recorder greatly expanded children’s rehearsal options. As multimedia environments emerged, different media could also activate different cognitive skills and improve learning by fostering interactive, individualized exchanges between children and educational content.

3. Displacement Effects

What have children given up to listen, to view, or to interact with media? Uses and gratification theory provides the framework for understanding these shifts in leisure time activities. In this theory, children and adults have certain needs, such as entertainment or education. Children use media to fulfil or to gratify those needs.

Film and television have been heavily criticized for replacing valuable educational activities, such as reading books. Early research suggests that television displaced activities that filled similar needs for children in the USA as well as in other nations (Murray and Kippax 1978, Schramm et al. 1961). For instance, television replaced comic book reading, not book reading. Although later cross-cultural research did implicate television viewing with a decrease in children’s reading skills, watching educational television is related to reading books. Thus, displacement effects depend on children’s specific uses of media.

Media also displace one another. Just as television displaced going to films and listening to the radio in the middle of the twentieth century, video games and Internet computer use began to take time away from television viewing by the end of the century. Nonetheless, television remained children’s dominant and most used technology of the twentieth century with American children spending two–three hours per day in the presence of an operating television set. Access to cable and satellite television content increased children’s exposure. The digital age will add increased clarity to images and multiple options to use media in interactive ways. Historical media usage patterns suggest that entertainment needs have and will continue to drive American children’s use of media though the children of certain other cultures, such as Israel, seem to invest more effort in extracting educational messages.

4. Impact of Gender and Ethnic Media Stereotypes

Children look to media to learn information about themselves as well as others. Because children bring their own unique qualities to media experiences, schematic information processing models, in which learned expectations guide perception, memory, and inferences about others, have been key theoretical approaches for understanding how stereotyped media content impacts them.

In American television programs, stereotypes about men and women have been prevalent throughout the twentieth century in terms of the number of major roles portrayed and the kinds of personality characteristics, occupational roles, and behaviors displayed. Children understand and remember the stereotyped presentations that they see. Counter stereotyped portrayals can also be learned by children, but children sometimes distort the content of these presentations to fit traditional gender stereotypes. For instance, children tend to remember television portrayals of male nurses and female doctors as male doctors and female nurses.

Video games are overwhelmingly created around male interests, such as aggression, fostering boys’ early interest in the world of computers. Although many video games contain violent content, children also develop visual spatial skills by playing them. Computer content also often reflects male interests, such as mathematics. Boys spend more time interacting with computers than girls do, particularly as children get older and as programming skills are required. Girls, however, do participate with computers, particularly when they perceive the interaction as gender appropriate.

Internet explorations by adolescents often take the direction of identity experimentation. In a virtual world where one can create his or her own identity, many young men and women engage in gender swapping, in which males present themselves as females and females present themselves as males (Turkle 1995). These presentations are particularly prevalent on MUDs, multiuser domains or dungeons, in which adolescents enact various roles and create imaginative places in cyberspace.

Ethnic stereotypes are also prevalent in television portrayals. The Civil Rights Movement led to changes in the representation of African Americans. Roles became less stereotyped, and the number of African Americans males on television approximated their real-life numbers in the American population. At the end of the twentieth century, Latinos were the most under-represented group of American citizens in comparison with their prevalence in society. Women of all ethnic minority groups remained virtually invisible and under-represented. There is relatively little literature about how these portrayals impact children. What is known is that children of ethnic minority groups prefer seeing characters that are of their own ethnic background, and these characters sometimes serve as models for them.

Computer purchases reveal that Asian Americans buy the most computers, followed by Caucasian Americans, Latino Americans, and African Americans. These buying patterns suggest that some ethnic groups will have earlier access to the information highway and to computer technologies than will others, perhaps creating a digital divide that accentuates disparities in future educational and employment opportunities among these groups.

5. Conclusion

The twentieth century witnessed the emergence and displacement of various media, yet each maintained its own unique place in children’s lives. Across media, themes about morality, stereotypes, education, and children’s use of their free time recurred as public interest groups attempted to protect and improve children’s media environments. These same themes will continue to guide research and policy initiatives in the twenty-first century as multimedia systems converge and merge.

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