Children's Radio Research Articles

Arai and the Capybara. Children's radio drama about the Lower Parana River wetlands, Argentina (in Spanish)

Arai and the Capybara. Children's radio drama about the Lower Parana River wetlands, Argentina (in Spanish)

The specifics of the pronoun "we" as an instrument of author's self-identification in new youth media (based on podcasts)

The subject of the study is the specifics of the functioning of the pronoun "we" in the self-presentation of authors and presenters of modern podcasts. The object of the study is a semantic shift in the profile of this pronoun, due to the increasing popularity of the podcast as a genre. The authors consider in detail such aspects of the topic as the differentiation of the inclusive and exclusive pronoun "we" and the distinction within the inclusive meaning of extended and nuclear inclusiveness. Particular attention is paid to the implementation of extended inclusion in various podcasts and tracing the trend of expansion of this form in the speech of the presenter. The texts of various podcasts focused on children and youth audience are considered. The main conclusion of the study is the statement of the increasing role of the extended inclusive semantic version of "we" in modern Russian media, as well as the distinction according to linguistic criteria between the genre of podcast and radio. A special contribution of the authors to the study of the topic is the analysis of the contexts of the use of the pronoun "we" and its derivatives in modern podcasts and the generalization of the patterns of its use. The novelty of the research lies in the study of changes in the semantic profile of the pronoun "we" on the example of podcasting: previously, such studies were conducted only in relation to children's radio shows, podcasts, despite their increasing popularity with the audience, are practically not analyzed in terms of linguistic content and influence on the linguistic landscape of the modern Russian language.

Therapeutic Horror? Olga Druce, House of Mystery and the Controversy over Children's Radio Thrillers

From the 1930s to the 1950s, parents, educators, psychologists and others hotly debated the impact of US radio’s sensational genre programming on young listeners. While many condemned radio thrillers and chillers for subjecting children to excessive emotional arousal, or for encouraging juvenile delinquency, more progressive authorities argued for their cathartic potential. Drawing on a wide range of materials from contemporary newspapers, magazines, trade journals and radio shows, this article examines the post-World War 2 revival of this controversy over sensational programming. It explores the efforts of child education experts such as Josette Frank to contest the emotive denunciation of children’s radio, and children’s culture more broadly, as well as their attempt to develop child-centered programming that combined thrills with socially-enlightened content. The popular and award-winning House of Mystery (1945-49) was a key exemplification of this strategy. Building on the success Frank and producer Robert Maxwell enjoyed with the acclaimed juvenile serial The Adventures of Superman (1940-51), Maxwell’s House of Mystery was an audacious program that tailored horror scenarios to young listeners. Under the stewardship of visionary writer-director Olga Druce, this popular and award-winning program sought a strategic compromise between the pleasures and the perils of audio horror. While delivering the stimulation children desired from genre fare, House of Mystery served as a therapeutic intervention that countered both the morbid sensations peddled by crime and horror dramas and the predictable condemnation of youth programming.

Eskola eta irratia: EHko 5 haur-irrati, Arabako 6 eskola-irrati eta Gasteizko Alai Bediren esperientzia

En este artículo se ha analizado la utilidad de la radio como recurso didáctico y el uso que actualmente se le da en 6 centros educativos de Álava, tanto en Educación Infantil como, en mayor medida, en Primaria. También se describen en otros territorios de Euskal Herria 4 casos en los que radios profesionales ofrecen sus servicios a las escuelas. Por último, se explica cómo durante el curso académico 2014-2015 se creó un nuevo programa infantil en la radio Hala Bedi de Vitoria-Gasteiz que permitió experimentar las posibilidades educativas de este medio de comunicación.

Community-based Responses to HIV/AIDS in South Africa: An Evaluation of a Children’s Radio Programme

Children community radio programmes are among the very few programmes in Southern Africa that seek to raise HIV/AIDS knowledge and awareness on children. These programmes are designed to enable children to learn useful life skills as well as contribute to broader public awareness on issues facing Southern African children in the context of poverty and the HIV epidemic. The idea of 'child-participation' forms the core of children radio programmes. It locates the child as having a fundamental responsibility in the response to HIV/AIDS. The assumption is that children need to be capacitated with HIV/ AIDS information to build awareness. This article focuses on the results of a process evaluation of a children radio programme conducted in South Africa. The purpose of the evaluation was to gather information related to programme implementation and performance. For this evaluation, qualitative methods comprising semi-structured interviews, observations and document analysis were used. In this evaluation, inductive thematic analysis was employed to establish how the children's radio programme was being implemented. The results of the evaluation showed high levels of implementation fidelity.

Community-based Responses to HIV/AIDS in South Africa: An Evaluation of a Children’s Radio Programme

Children community radio programmes are among the very few programmes in Southern Africa that seek to raise HIV/AIDS knowledge and awareness on children. These programmes are designed to enable children to learn useful life skills as well as contribute to broader public awareness on issues facing Southern African children in the context of poverty and the HIV epidemic. The idea of 'child-participation' forms the core of children radio programmes. It locates the child as having a fundamental responsibility in the response to HIV/AIDS. The assumption is that children need to be capacitated with HIV/ AIDS information to build awareness. This article focuses on the results of a process evaluation of a children radio programme conducted in South Africa. The purpose of the evaluation was to gather information related to programme implementation and performance. For this evaluation, qualitative methods comprising semi-structured interviews, observations and document analysis were used. In this evaluation, inductive thematic analysis was employed to establish how the children's radio programme was being implemented. The results of the evaluation showed high levels of implementation fidelity.

“Good Morals Are Good Business”: The Cultural Economy of Children's Radio in the Late 1930s

This article takes a critical media industry studies approach to analyzing the production of children's radio in the 1930s, specifically looking at the tactical exchanges between NBC executives and the owners/producers of the Green Hornet, Little Orphan Annie, and Superman, focusing on the discursive labor to reconcile commercial and pro-social interests that framed these interactions. I argue that these discursive exchanges not only shaped the expressive culture that was produced during this era, but they also helped to define and refine the occupational identities of the corporate executives that oversaw the production and distribution of children's radio programs. In so doing, I seek to complicate the typical political economic argument that commercial interests undermined radio's social/educational value by examining how consumer culture was reframed by industry participants as having positive values to impart to children so long as it was properly managed.

Shootout at the Gender Corral: Annie Oakley Deconstructs Gender

Shootout at the Gender Corral:Annie Oakley Deconstructs Gender L. Clare Bratten (bio) From 1954 to 1956, television's Annie Oakley (played by actress Gail Davis) competed and won effortlessly in a rough-and-tumble man's world that valued skilled shooting, riding, and toughness of mind. A spunky, pigtailed young blonde woman in a fringed buckskin outfit, Annie was fearless, truthful, unflirtatious, and determined to oppose law-breakers, immorality, and selfishness wherever they arose. Although a pie on the kitchen table might be identified as one that she had baked, within seconds of learning about trouble Annie would leap onto her horse and gallop off to interrupt another round of criminal behavior. Tender hearted and warm toward her kid brother, Tagg, she was flinty-eyed and unruffled after shooting the gun out of the hand of a villain or surveying the carnage of a gun battle. And in the weekly introductory credits, Annie was shown overtaking a runaway stagecoach, stealthily climbing in a window, and doing trick riding, including one breathtaking sequence in which she stands on the saddle of her horse while the horse is moving at a full gallop and shoots the center out of a target held by a cowboy—the ace of spades from a deck of cards. Although the character of Annie Oakley had been popularized in 1946 by Ethel Merman in the Broadway musical Annie Get Your Gun, she remained innovative as a network heroine because she was so different from other representations of femininity on television in the 1950s. Prime-time shows such as I Love Lucy, Father Knows Best, Ozzie and Harriet, Our Miss Brooks, Mama, and Private Secretary generated images of women as homemakers, mothers-in-law, teachers, and secretaries. In sharp contrast, Annie Oakley, an altered vision of the original historical person, was portrayed as a hero—not a sitcom mother but the star of her own action-adventure series. By the standards of the time, the vision of femininity this series presented was radical, the show itself an anomalous variation on the ubiquitous children's adventures and Westerns that television aired over that decade. Annie Oakley was both entertainment and profit-generating medium at a historical moment when program formats and scheduling were changing quickly as networks, programmers, and advertisers sought ways to secure viewership and stabilize the industry. How did the institutional practices of television programming in the 1950s produce a show that challenged some of the dominant myths about gender roles? How and why did the text and genre work to construct Annie as an essentially genderless being whose femininity was so uncertain that her clashing gendered attributes, a pair of pigtails and a buckskin shirt, appeared to be performative iconic accoutrements stuck on like pie dough? This article will examine the show within the context of its genre and children's programming in general in order to illuminate some of the ways in which Annie Oakley destabilized conventional representations of femininity. According to media historian Joseph Turow, early television of the late 1940s to mid-1950s adopted the program formats that governed children's radio. These shows were live and segmented into fifteen-or thirty-minute episodes. Turow claims that by the 1930s, the radio shows broadcast for children changed from storybook or variety-show presentations to "thriller dramas," often adapted from popular sources such as newspaper comics, pulp magazines, movies, or juvenile novels (17). These serials used open formats with "cliff-hanger endings" that, like soap operas, were designed to encourage repeat listening. In 1948 the format began to change when ABC developed the episodic half-hour format called a "series," which presented a show with a complete plot but whose characters returned each week. Two afternoon radio series, Jack Armstrong and Sky King, were the first to finish out a story but to return the next week with the same cast of characters in a new adventure. This series format, as opposed to the cliffhanger serial, became the staple fictional format used by television, except for daytime soap operas. The television series of the 1950s also slotted these programs in the late afternoon and early dinner hours, the same hours devoted to children...

Walter Benjamin for Children: An Essay on His Radio Years

In light of the legendary difficulty of Benjamin's works, it is a strange and intriguing fact that from 1929 to 1933 the great critic and cultural theorist wrote--and broadcast--numerous scripts, on the order of fireside chats, for children. Invited to speak on whatever subject he considered appropriate, Benjamin talked to the children of Frankfurt and Berlin about the destruction of Pompeii, an earthquake in Lisbon, and a railroad disaster at the Firth of Tay. He spoke about bootlegging and swindling, cataclysm and suicide, Faust and Cagliostro. In this first sustained analysis of the thirty surviving scripts, Jeffrey Mehlman demonstrates how Benjamin used the unlikely forum of children's radio to pursue some of his central philosophical and theological concerns. In Walter Benjamin for Children, readers will encounter a host of intertextual surprises: an evocation of the flooding of the Mississippi informed by the argument of Task of the Translator; a discussion of scams in stamp-collecting that turns into Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction; a tale of bootlegging in the American South that converges with the best of Benjamin's essays on fiction. Mehlman superimposes a dual series of texts dealing with catastrophe, on the one hand, and fraud, on the other, that resonate with the false- messianic theology of Sabbatianism as it came to focus the attention and enthusiasm of Benjamin's friend Gershom Scholem during the same years. The radio scripts for children, that is, offer an unexpected byway, on the eve of the apocalypse, into Benjamin's messianic preoccupations. A child's garden of deconstruction, these twenty-minute talks--from theperspective of childhood, before an invisible audience, on whatever happened to cross the critic's mind--are also by their very nature the closest we may ever come to a transcript of a psychoanalysis of Benjamin. Particularly alive to that circumstance, Mehlman explores the themes of the radio broadcasts and brilliantly illuminates their hidden connections to Benjamin's life and work. This lucid analysis brings to light some of the least researched and understood aspects of Benjamin's thought. It will interest and provoke literary theorists and philosophers of culture, as well as anyone who hopes to understand one of this century's most suggestive and perplexing critics.

Learning science from children's radio: Summative evaluation ofKinetic City Super Crew

The impact of four half-hour science programs aired on commercial radio was assessed in a causal-comparative between-groups study with prebroadcast and postbroadcast questionnaires. Of 253 fourth graders, 34% listened to one or more shows of the Kinetic City Super Crew series. Significantly more girls listened than boys. Listeners and Non-listeners did not differ on background variables of ethnic status, science attitudes, science reading and television viewing, and participation in seven of eight common at-home science activities. After broadcast, significant group differences, all favoring Listeners over Non-Listeners were obtained on five of twelve true-false statements and two of four science phenomena questions. Significantly more Listeners than Non-listeners engaged in home science activities, which included projects directly related to the series's content. The programs were not successful in affecting science attitudes or countering stereotypes. Overall, results were interpreted as suggesting the positive potential for using radio to expose children to science at an early age.

The relationship between attributes of a children's radio program and its appeal to listeners

An approach was developed to investigate the link between attributes of a children's radio program and children's judgments of appeal. Program tapes were divided into 28 segments and were rated for the presence of 30 attributes. Through multidimensional scaling analysis, attributes were organized into six clusters of “Superattributes” on the basis of their co-occurrence across the 28 segments. Superattributes were labeled and assigned scores that reflected the degree to which each was present in the 28 segments. A sample of 42 children 8–12 years old listened to the test tapes and provided a written judgment of their interest in the program at each segment. Results revealed that the Superattributes “Instruction,” “Intro Talk,” and “Jokes” were negatively associated with children's interest, while “Popular Music” was positively correlated with interest. In planning programs and understanding the effects of radio on children, designers and researchers should pay special attention to those formats in radio programming that are familiar to children, especially popular music and instructional material.

Children's Radio Programs and Their Impact on the Economics of Children's Popular Culture

Children's Radio Programs and Their Impact on the Economics of Children's Popular Culture

ABC Children's Radio: Coming Back into the Mainstream

Making radio programs for children is very exciting. Writers, producers and actors can be bold and imaginative because the responses of the young audience are fresh and vital, hot yet deadened by a lengthy exposure to the format programs of adult commercial television. And the act of listening to good story programs on radio uses the imaginative resources of the listener to provide the visual element so that the experience becomes collaborative and intensely personal.

An analysis of the violence content of the radio thriller dramas—and some comparisons with television

This exploratory study adapts current television content analysis procedures to determine the violence content of both adult and children's radio “thriller”; dramas. Comparisons with television show similar amounts of violence.

Some Effects of the "Space" Serials

The general public, parents, teachers, and social scientists have long been concerned with the effects of children's radio programs. In the study reported here, the author investigated children's identification with radio characters and their acceptance of values espoused by those characters. He found that success was the most important element in determining whether the personality would be accepted or rejected. Robert Zajonc is Research Associate in the Research Center for Group Dynamics at the University of Michigan.

Mothers' opinions of children's radio programs.

Mothers' opinions of children's radio programs.

Effectiveness of children's radio programs.

Effectiveness of children's radio programs.

Preliminary results of a study of mothers' opinions of children's radio programs.

Preliminary results of a study of mothers' opinions of children's radio programs.