Table of Contents
Issue #3 as well as supplement added at the end.
Communication Research Trends:
Improving Children's Television
vol. 4 no. 3 1983
Research Trends in Religious Communication:
What is 'Good' Religious Programming for Children?
vol. 4 no. 3 1983
Abstract
Few areas of television programming have provoked such strong public concern and protest as children's programmes. Parents and educators fear that television may be disrupting the balanced development of children's personalities or implanting harmful values. Most of the early research on children's television was an attempt to determine more accurately whether content was truly violent or manipulative and whether violence, advertising or other content was having destructive effects.
This public reaction also sparked moves in the late 1960s to carefully design programmes such as Sesame Street which would be entertaining, instructive and contribute to the intellectual-emotional growth of the child.
In many cases the creators of these programmes asked child psychologists and researchers on children's media to help in the planning of the content and methods. This opened up new directions in the research on children and media: formative research to design programmes; summative research to determine whether programme objectives were really being realised; and research on the potential of television for constructive, 'prosocial' programmes. Since many of the programmes were aimed at specific age groups - preschoolers, preadolescents, adolescents - this demanded research on the stages of child development and the growth of cognitive capacity.
This issue reviews some of the current debate regarding the design of programmes for child development.
Recommended Citation
(1983)
"Improving Children's Television,"
Communication Research Trends: Vol. 4:
No.
3, Article 1.
Available at:
https://scholarcommons.scu.edu/crt/vol4/iss3/1
