Description
The average North American child, from age 3 to age 16, spends one-sixth of his waking hours on television. This is as much time as he spends in school, more time than he devotes to any other activity except sleep and play. Here is a report of the first major study on the North American continent of the complicated way in which television operates in the lives of children. It represents three years of research on 6,000 children, and is also based on information obtained from 2,300 parents, teachers, and school officials.
The book begins with a consideration of the part televisions plays in the lives of children, then fills in the basic facts -- how much children use television at different ages under different conditions, what kinds of programs they watch, and what they think of them. Then it examines t he chief variables--intelligence, social backgrounds, and home and peer-group relationships--which, along with age and sex make it possible to predict generally what use a child will make of television. One interesting finding is that children in a town with television are about a year more advanced in vocabulary when they enter school than are children in a town without television. It appears, however, that the learning advantage is not maintained for more than a few years.
The book then considers the chief effects which have been ascribed to television, such as delinquency and debasement of taste, and tests the validity of these claims. It sums up everything so far discovered by research concerning the effects of television on children, and the conclusions that can now safely be drawn. An interesting feature is a detailed analysis of a typical week (five weekdays) of the television fare seen in a major city during the period from 4:00 to 9:00 P.M., the so-called "children's hour." The results showed that more than half the 100 hours monitored was given to programs in which extreme violence (murders, stranglings, suicides, etc.) played an important part.
In conclusion, t he authors suggest some things that parents, schools, and broadcasters can do to keep televisions from possibly having a harmful effect on children.
An eminent professor of psychiatry, Dr. Lawrence Z. Freedman, has contributed a paper giving a psychiatric view of the problem. Detailed statistics and tabulations are given tin the Appendixes, which also contain information about related topics (such as children's use of other mass media).
Mr. Schramm is Director of the Institute for Communication Research, Stanford University. Mr. Lyle is Assistant Professor in the Graduate School of Journalism, University of California, Los Angeles. Mr. Parker is Assistant Professor in the Institute of Communications Research, University of Illinois.
This is a reproduction edition from a scanned copy of the following original edition:
Title Televisión in the lives of our children
Authors Wilbur Lang Schramm, Jack Lyle, Edwin B. Parker, Lawrence Z. Freedman
Publisher Stanford University Press, 1961
ISBN 0804700621, 9780804700627
Length 324 pages
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stanford university press, Situation comedy, mass media, Tenth grade, comic books, popular music, Radio Movies, deferred gratification, escape magazines, Twelfth grade, peer group, sixth grade, Rocky Mountain towns, Meerlo, 77 Sunset Strip, Dick Clark, television programs, CANADA, Bovs, Peter Gunn, Disneyland 
