Table of Contents
Issue #1 as well as supplement added at the end.
Communication Research Trends:
Television Viewing and Family Communication
vol. 5 no. 3 1984
Research Trends in Religious Communication:
The Family, Religion and the Media
vol. 5 no. 3 1984
Abstract
Over the past thirty years a host of research studies has sought to determine just what are the effects of television viewing on social behaviour. In particular, study after study has attempted to establish once and for all whether or not the watching of violent programmes by children and adolescents is a direct cause of later aggressive behaviour.
Yet today all that these studies can tell us for certain is that ''for some children, under some conditions, some television is harmful'' and that ''for most children, under most conditions, most television is probably neither harmful nor particularly beneficial." And we still know very little about how families, as distinct from individual family members, interact with and use television in their everyday life.
As long ago as 1972 the US Surgeon General's Advisory Committee Report on Television and Social Behavior requested that television be studied in the home environment. Ten years later the update of the Surgeon General's Report, Television and Behavior, called once again for more studies on family interaction with television, and for a research approach which uses the family or the peer group as the unit of analysis.
This issue ofTRENDS examines some recent research which has attempted to respond to the concerns raised by the Surgeon General's Report. The first section discusses research which builds up social learning, and uses and gratifications theories to explore how the family acts as a mediator of television's effects. The second section surveys recent work on the relationship between television portrayal of family life and family communication patterns. The third section examines some of the newer theories and methods which have been devised to explain how families use television. The last section offers a briefintroduction to research on the interaction of families with the video cassette recorder.
Recommended Citation
(1984)
"Television Viewing and Family Communication,"
Communication Research Trends: Vol. 5:
No.
3, Article 1.
Available at:
https://scholarcommons.scu.edu/crt/vol5/iss3/1
