Conclusions: Making Screens Make Sense for Young Children

Abstract

This collection of research chapters and commentaries was organized around the myriad and intersecting roles that child factors, content attributes, and contextual features play in determining which, whether, and why young children are affected by media exposure. By considering the young child as embedded in and interacting with particular contexts (e.g., home, school, parents, siblings) while simultaneously engaging with diverse media content, a more complex and nuanced view of the impact of media in their lives begins to emerge. Although developmental scientists have argued for models that avoid “piecemeal analysis, fixed in time and space, of isolated aspects” (p. 75, Bronfenbrenner, 1944), much of the early research investigating media effects did just this. Scholars spent a great deal of time studying simple cause → effect relations (i.e., exposure → outcomes) in the absence of content at least through the first few decades of media research. In 2001, Anderson and colleagues presented a longitudinal study where specific content effects were hypothesized and tested across a variety of outcomes. Despite this advance in attending to content, other contextual influences were incorporated as covariates, a trend that continues to dominate media research today. More recently, a number of researchers have argued for more contextually sensitive models to examine who is affected by what content under which circumstances (e.g., Jordan, 2004; Linebarger & Vaala, 2010; Valkenburg & Peter, 2013; Vandewater, 2013). When such contextually sensitive models have been used, researchers have found larger effect sizes for children who were most susceptible to these contexts (e.g., Linebarger, 2015a; Linebarger, Barr, Lapierre, & Piotrowski, 2014).