Abstract
The development of children and television as an area of scientific investigation with a history of its own, owes more to the persistence of public anxiety about the adverse influence of television on the young than to any possible academic gains the research has generated. This is perhaps particularly true of the controversies over the effects of televised violence. In this opening chapter, the historical trajectory of work on children and television in English will be outlined, and its roots in public worries over the influence of popular media traced back to the late nineteenth century.
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Notes
- 1.
The extract was taken from The Poetical Works of William Blake, published in 1913 by Oxford University Press in London, p74.
- 2.
For a more detailed summary of the two non-English studies, see The Effects of Television on Children and Adolescents, published in 1964 by UNESCO (prepared by IAMCR).
- 3.
Firstly, the Dodd Hearings in 1961; and then the Pastore Hearings in 1972.
- 4.
For a more detailed account of these theories, see Liebert and Sprafkin (1988).
- 5.
There is a noticeable discrepancy here. If the Surgeon General’s report was published in 1972, 20 years since the publication will be the year 1992. However, the most recent study reviewed here in this chapter was published in 1986 and this edition of the book was published in 1988.
- 6.
The word highly ‘burgeoned’ is questionable here. It depends on the frame of reference. Taken as a whole, the intellectual centre of gravity had clearly moved towards the interpretative approaches to children and television. What is meant here is that the absolute number of studies on television violence has increased compared with the previous decade.
- 7.
For a better idea of the arguments supporting television advertising, see Liebert and Sprafkin (1988), p. 165.
- 8.
A typical study of this kind is Images of Life on Children’s Television by F. Earle Barcus, published in1983 by Praeger Publishers. The study also provides a comprehensive review of pertinent literature.
- 9.
For a more detailed summary of research on Sesame Street, see Palmer and Dorr (1980), pp. 51–55.
- 10.
For a brief summary of research in this area, see John P. Murray (1980), pp. 44–45.
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Zhao, B. (2013). Children and Television: Public Concern and Scientific Research. In: The Little Emperors’ New Toys. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-32048-4_1
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