Children are often overlooked as resourceful participants with opinions, ideas and perspectives in the research and policy arena even when they are important stakeholders. In commissioning this review, the Broadcasting Standards Authority (BSA) has recognised the relevance and importance of research not just concerning children but also involving them. In a rapidly expanding and changing world of new media technology children are the pioneers and vanguards of new and different ways of interacting with media. Former divisions between media platforms are fused and blurred in this new media world to the extent that ‘traditional’ broadcast media may be accessed in multiple ways. This review of children’s use of media and their responses to it is set within this rapidly changing media landscape.
The review examined four major aspects of children and media: physical access, selection and ways of using media, social contexts of media use, and responses to media accessed and used. Literature excluded from the review included the substantive and well-reviewed children and media violence literature and literature concerned with children’s health and media use. Literature selected for review spanned diverse methodologies, including observational field research, experimental studies, qualitative interview and focus group research, surveys, and studies using innovative methods such as directly employing new technologies as research tools.
Methodology
Observational field research, experimental studies, qualitative interview and focus group research, surveys, and studies
Key Results
Children’s media access and use
- Children are also demonstrating complex patterns of multitasking in media use
- There is a concern about the equity of media access, content, and representation in families in lower socio-economic groups
- Interactivity of new media suggests positive potential for helping children fine-tune cognitive skills, and offers ways of helping children to be when interacting with media
- Needs to tackle the complex and challenging area of elaborating knowledge and understanding of how children manage the web of possible interactions and uses that new media presents
Social contexts of media use
- Children and young people often use media in the company of others – with families in the lounge, siblings in a bedroom, or with friends
- As much as media facilitates social interaction, social interaction can also facilitate media use
- The place that television and other media equipment have in a home depends on family structure and demographics, a range of practical and moral issues and by how families organise their space and their time
Children’s media responses
- Ways children respond to media are complex and influenced by factors like experience, culture, social environment, age, and gender
- Children’s responses to violent or frightening material, or to sexual content, cannot be assumed to be negative or harmful
- New media, through inter-connectivity and access to global content, magnifies the potential for children to be exposed to disturbing or sexually explicit material
- Dispels notions of television as an ‘ogre’ adversely affecting and influencing children
- Relationship between children’s ‘work’ and leisure accent the positive ways in which children engage with television material
- Agree with other researchers that children are active agents in their relationships with media and bring with them a host of skills and knowledge
- The challenge is to study – in an interdisciplinary theoretical and methodological fashion – how children’s cognitive, social, and ecological development interfaces with their media use, access, and responses