Across the Divide

Abstract

Social scientists studying children and media have traditionally drawn upon processes and effects research, cognitive and developmental psychology, family studies, socialization, communication law and policy, and marketing research. However, over the last two decades, such studies have increasingly focused on the contextual factors of media use. Thus, analysts have begun to approach children's relationships with media content as a study of peer groups, family units, and cultural environments. Scholars have increasingly acknowledged the difficulties involved in separating media effects from their complex social environments. Cultural and critical analysts, for their part, have long argued that a separation of popular media from their cultural contexts misses the point. However, these analysts have been criticized because they were unable to determine the media's contributions to child development. Hence, the theoretical divide between effects research, which isolates specific variables, and cultural/critical analyses, which focus attention on complex naturalistic environments, has become an impediment to understanding how media function. The time has come to integrate the insights of these two perspectives into a cohesive picture of children and media. This paradigmatic divisiveness is particularly evident in three recently edited books: Dorothy G. Singer and Jerome L. Singer's (2001) Handbook of Children and the Media, Jennings Bryant and J. Alison Bryant's (2001) Television and the American Family, and Marsha Kinder's (1999) Kids' Media Culture. Each presents valuable insights on children's relationship with media, their families, and their social environments. Yet, the limitations of these works also suggest that scholars need to question the theoretical and ideological divides that separate them into distinct research paradigms. Many of the individual authors in these books would do well to pool their knowledge and integrate the findings born of their diverse perspectives. The handbooks by Singer and Singer, and by Bryant and Bryant, are grounded in Bandura's and Piaget's complementary theories of childhood development. Bandura's (1986) social cognitive theory, which is particularly salient in these books, suggests that children learn by observing how others deal with challenging situations. For example, Singer and Singer's book includes a chapter by Bushman and Huesmann (2001) that cites numerous studies in which observational learning from televised violence resulted in both behavioral and attitudinal change in young viewers. The authors' larger point, however, is that this effect is universal, dependent only on adults' abilities to intervene in television's direct effects. In the same volume, Malamuth and Impett (2001) go further, arguing that humans have not developed a finely tuned sense for distinguishing fiction from reality. Realistic portrayals, judged in reference to viewers' prior social experiences, are the trigger mechanisms of media effects. Kubey and Donovan's (2001) chapter on viewers' perceptions of family extends this notion to attitude acquisition, showing how television shapes our expectations of family life and membership. Rosenkoetter (2001), likewise, applies the social cognitive theory to children's moral development, outlining a process by which television cues and guides moral behavior. Singer and Singer also clearly wed developmental psychology to studies of mass media. Therefore, it should be no surprise that Piaget's (1970, 1972) development theory provides the second dominant perspective in their work. It holds that children's cognitive skills are cued by a child's interaction with and adaptation to the physical-social environment. This theory, in combination with information processing (Andre & Phye, 1986; Atkinson & Shiffrin, 1968) and schema theories (Bartlett, 1932; Rumelhart & Ortony, 1977), forms the foundation of the chapters on attention, message interpretation, and memory. …