Second, it examines how the utilization of new media is tied to other aspects of children’s lives. It reports changes in the past decade in the utilization of computers, video games, and television in comparison with other activities among children in middle childhood. The present research is the first to examine the implications for children of increased exposure to media at home using nationally representative data. Finally, few studies focus on middle childhood, an important period in establishing long-term media habits, one in which large changes in media use are occurring, and one in which the family context is critical.
Most studies fail to include reliable measures of what else children are doing and what tradeoffs between activities are made. Not adjusting media time for simultaneous use leads to exaggerated estimates of total time spent with media, implying a day of more than 24 hours.
Comparing children’s media use over time is difficult because research reports do not use comparable samples of children and often do not break out results for age groups. A recent critique of a leading textbook on children and the media pointed to the lack of systematic information over time on children’s use of television, computers, and other media ( Sotirovic, 2005). Another major change was in access to the Internet the proportion of children living in a home with Internet access rose from 47% to 74% between 19 ( Roberts et al., 2005).Īs a result of the rapid diffusion of new technologies, research on their effects has been slow to catch up. In 1999, children 8 to 18 spent only 27 minutes in an average day using the computer for recreation at home that had more than doubled to just over 1 hour by 2004.
In 1999, fewer than half (47%) of children 8 to 18 used a computer during the previous day, rising to 54% by 2004 ( Roberts et al., 2005). Although they may not be new to many adults - three quarters of children lived in a home with a computer in 1999 - the usage by children of home computers and video games, what are called new media, is relatively recent. Since then, there has been a dramatic increase in communication technologies available to the public, all of which are subsumed under the term, media. In 1950, only about 9% of American families owned a television set, but by the early 1980s, when the first systematic examinations of children’s time began, 98% of American families owned one ( Anderson, Huston, Schmitt & Linebarger, 2001 Andreasen, 1994). Recent reports emphasize the pervasive influence of the media on children’s lives ( Roberts, Foehr & Rideout, 2005).
0 kommentar(er)
