An agenda for research on youth and the media

Abstract

Young people today are growing up in a world unlike anything previous generations experienced. Today’s youth have greater access to more forms of communication than ever before. A recent survey found that 8to 18-year-olds spend 6–8 hours/day exposed to some form of media (1). In addition to the traditional television (TV), music, magazines, and movies, new kinds of media such as interactive CDROMs, video games, E-mail, chat rooms, and Web sites provide everything from the latest scientific discoveries to surrogate friendships, virtual sex, and violence. Cataclysmic events sometimes force the public to grapple with issues that researchers have long been exploring. For example, the Littleton, Colorado, school shootings shocked the country into renewed concern about the role that media violence may be playing in the adoption of violent attitudes and behaviors by our youth. In the aftermath, mass communication scholars have pointed to a wealth of information based on more than 40 years of research on the negative effects of media violence. Still, this large body of research on the effects of violence in the media is largely unknown or is misunderstood by the general public, policy makers, and even researchers in other disciplines. Media violence is only one area of influence crucial to explore if we are to understand the role the current media environment may be playing in the development of today’s youth. Other aspects of youth health and well-being, such as sexuality, substance use, materialism, and civic engagement, have also been studied in the context of the mass media and deserve scrutiny and further analysis. At the request of the William T. Grant Foundation, which was embarking on a new initiative to stimulate research on youth, we invited about a dozen key thinkers and researchers to attend a meeting at the Foundation’s headquarters in New York. Ten of the attendees were university professors who have conducted scholarly research on the media over a period of years. Three of the invitees were policy experts or child advocates who use research findings to promote children’s well-being. The researchers were asked to review briefly what is currently known in their area of expertise about how adolescents use and are affected by the media and to make recommendations for future research. The child and youth advocates were asked to suggest the types of research that would be helpful to them in ensuring a healthy media environment for youth in the future. All participants submitted brief abstracts of their positions before the meeting that could be reviewed in advance. The meeting took place on November 16, 1999, to hear and discuss each other’s reports and to develop an agenda for research. Although we each had been working on different aspects of youths’ experience, we had similar concerns and a desire to have our work make a difference in the lives of young people. The research reports provided here are not meant to be exhaustive literature reviews. Instead, they are intended to bring readers up to date on the major issues being addressed in each area, to delineate what the major established findings are, and to point out what we think are the most important gaps in our knowledge.