Today the Society for Research in Child Development kicked off its biennial meeting in Boston, where thousands of researchers in child psychology have descended to talk about their latest findings. I'm here too, ready to zoom in on new results related to media, technology and what children learn. The blogs posts to follow will inevitably sound a little scattershot, and I don't expect to uncover any big trends in the short time I'm here, but the hope is to offer a fly-on-the-wall view of what experts in this area are talking about.
One topic this afternoon, for example, was the influence of media -- mostly DVDs and TV shows -- on how adolescents think about themselves. One study, led by Jen Kotler, who is now a director at Sesame Workshop, offered some reassuring results: Teens admired characters with pro-social qualities, though kids who had conduct-disorder problems were more likely to like more aggressive characters. Another study showed that children in elementary grades were more prone to understand a video if they empathized with the characters on it. The study, presented by Sandra Calvert at Georgetown, focused on Disney's Beauty and the Beast. In a third study, David Bickham of the Center for Media and Children's Health showed new data that linked reality television shows and teens' dissatisfaction with their body image.
Kelly L'Engle of the University of North Carolina provided a glimpse of new data from UNC's Teen Media Project. By analyzing teen's responses to health and media surveys, while also compiling data as personal as what they hang on their bedroom walls, L'Engle and colleagues were able to draw some conclusions about the media habits of teenagers who are sexually active, or want to be. The teens clustered around one of 4 types: "virgin valedictorians," "curious conservatives," "silent susceptibles" and "sexual sophisticates." (I know that all of us in the room couldn't help but ponder which category we fell into when we were teenagers. Let me just say, I'm not telling.)
The panelists readily acknowledged that new research will need to be done to completely disentangle what causes what: Is the media influencing teens and providing them with good and bad role models? Or are children who are already identifying with certain characteristics simply drawn to particular types of media? More work needs to be done to sort out these perennial questions.
9:11:07 PM 
|
|
