Skip over navigation

Journal Issue: Children and Electronic Media Volume 18 Number 1 Spring 2008

Trends in Media Use
Authors: Donald F. Roberts Ulla G. Foehr

Endnotes

  1. Melvin L. DeFleur and Sandra Ball-Rokeach, Theories of Mass Communication, 5th ed. (New York: Longman, 1989).
  2. Eric C. Newberger, Computer Use in the United States (U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Reports, Department of Commerce, October, 1997) [www.census.gov/prod/99pubs/p.20-522.pdf]; Jennifer Cheeseman Day, Alex Janus, and Jessica Davis, Computer and Internet Use in the United States: 2003 (U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Reports, Department of Commerce, October, 2005) [www.census.gov/prod/2005pubs/p.23–208.pdf].
  3. Problems inherent in measuring media exposure are discussed by: George Comstock and Erica Scharrer, Television: What's On, Who's Watching, and What It Means (San Diego: Academic Press, 1999); Donald F. Roberts and Ulla G. Foehr, Kids and Media in America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004); John P. Robinson and Geoffrey Godbey, Time for Life: The Surprising Ways Americans Use Their Time (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997).
  4. Donald F. Roberts and others, Kids and Media at the New Millennium (Menlo Park, Calif.: Kaiser Family Foundation, 1999) and Roberts and Foehr, Kids and Media in America (see note 3), report data on two- through eight-year-olds gathered in 1999. Victoria J. Rideout, Elizabeth A. Vandewater, and Ellen A. Wartella, Zero to Six: Electronic Media in the Lives of Infants, Toddlers, and Preschoolers (Menlo Park, Calif.: Kaiser Family Foundation, 2003), reports data gathered on children from birth to age six in 2003; Victoria J. Rideout and Elizabeth Hamel, The Media Family: Electronic Media in the Lives of Infants, Toddlers, Preschoolers, and their Parents (Menlo Park, Calif.: Kaiser Family Foundation, 2006) reports data gathered on children from birth to age six in 2005.
  5. Roberts and others, Kids and Media at the New Millennium (see note 4), and Roberts and Foehr, Kids and Media in America (see note 3), provide data on older youths gathered in 1999; Donald F. Roberts, Ulla Foehr, and Victoria Rideout, Generation M: Media in the Lives of 8–18-year-olds (Menlo Park, Calif.: Kaiser Family Foundation, 2005) reports data gathered in 2004. Inclusion of media- focused, time-use diaries is an important element of these studies because they enable estimates of the proportion of time youngsters use several media concurrently, an increasingly common media behavior among U.S. young people, raising an array of new issues and questions.
  6. Roberts, Foehr, and Rideout, Generation M (see note 5).
  7. Nielsen Media Research, “Nielsen Study Shows DVD Players Surpass VCRs” (Press Release, December 19, 2007) (www.nielsenmedia.com/nc/portal/site/Public/menuitem.55dc65b4a7d5adff3f659361, [3/19/07]).
  8. Amanda Lenhart, Mary Madden, and Paul Hitlin, Teens and Technology: Youth Are Leading the Transition to a Fully Wired and Mobile Nation (Washington, D.C.: Pew Internet & American Life Project, July 27, 2005) [www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/Teens_Tech_July2005web.pdf].
  9. Mary Story, Karen M. Kaphingst, and Simone French, “The Role of Child Care Settings in Obesity Prevention,” Future of Children 16, no. 1 (2006): 143–68, refers to apparently anecdotal evidence that children spend more time with TV in child care homes than in child care centers.
  10. Henry J. Becker, “Analysis and Trends of School Use of New Information Technologies (U.S. Congressional Office of Technology Assessment, March, 1994) (www.gse.uci.edu/doehome/EdResource/Publications/EdTechUse/C-TBLCNT.HTM [March 5, 2007]); Richard J. Noeth and Boris B. Volkov, “Evaluating the Effectiveness of Technology in Our Schools” (Iowa City, Iowa: ACT Policy Report, 2004) (www.act.org/path/policy/pdf/school_tech.pdf [March 21, 2007]); “State of the States,” Education Week 24 (April 5, 2005); Basmat Parsad and Jennifer Jones, “Internet Access in U.S. Public Schools and Classrooms: 1994–2003,” Education Statistics Quarterly 7 (2005): 1–2.
  11. U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Survey (Department of Commerce, 2003) (www.census.gov/ population/www/socdemo/computer/2003.html).
  12. Roberts, Foehr, and Rideout, Generation M (see note 5).
  13. Parsad and Jones, “Internet Access in U.S. Public Schools and Classrooms: 1994–2003” (see note 10).
  14. The Children's Partnership, “Measuring Digital Opportunity for America's Children” (Santa Monica, Calif.: The Children's Partnership, 2005) www.contentbank.org/AM/Template. cfm?Section= Research_From_The_Childrens_Partnership&CONTENTID=8044&TEMPLATE=/CM/ContentDispl ay.cfm.
  15. See, for example, Jack Lyle and Heidi R. Hoffman, “Children's Use of Television and Other Media,” in Television and Social Behavior: Reports and Papers, vol. IV: Television in Day-to-Day Life: Patterns of Use, edited by Eli Rubinstein, George Comstock, and John Murray (Rockville, Md.: U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, 1972), pp. 129–256; Eleanor E. Maccoby, “Television: Its Impact on School Children,” Public Opinion Quarterly 15 (1951): 421–44; Wilbur Schramm, Jack Lyle, and Edwin B. Parker, Television in the Lives of Our Children (Stanford University Press, 1961).
  16. Although some recent studies have asked youngsters how often they use several media at once, the media use–media exposure distinction is possible only when research obtains measures of the amount of time youth use several media concurrently. Roberts and his colleagues (see note 5) accomplished this by collecting week-long time-use diaries asking youth to report all daily media activities for each half hour from 6 a.m. until midnight for seven days.
  17. Because Roberts, Foehr, and Rideout, Generation M (see note 5), included exposure to print media in their examination of young people's media use, their published estimates of total media use and exposure differ somewhat from those reported here, which include only electronic media.
  18. It should be noted, however, that exposure times for computers, video games, and “other” screen media are not strictly comparable from 1999 to 2004, because the latter questionnaire included items not covered in 1999 (for example, handheld video games, instant messaging, DVRs); Roberts, Foehr, and Rideout, Generation M (see note 5).
  19. Roberts, Foehr, and Rideout, Generation M (see note 5). For a review of studies that have looked at displacement attributed to the introduction of television, see Diana C. Mutz, Donald F. Roberts, and D.P. van Vuuren, “Reconsidering the Displacement Hypothesis: Television's Influence on Children's Time Use,” Communication Research 20 (1993): 51–74.
  20. Lenhart, Madden, and Hitlin, Teens and Technology (see note 8).
  21. George Comstock, Television and the American Child (San Diego, Calif.: Academic Press, 1991), reviews a number of early studies of young children's television viewing that illustrate lower exposure among younger children.
  22. Because data for younger and older children come from different data sources, results for the two age groupings have been kept separate in all tables and figures.
  23. This pattern, based on a “constructed curve” derived from abstracting findings from numerous small-scale, non-representative samples, was first noted by George Comstock and others, Television and Human Behavior (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), and was elaborated by Comstock, Television and the American Child (see note 21). Roberts and Foehr, Kids and Media in America (see note 3), using data gathered by Roberts, Foehr, and Rideout, Kids and Media at the New Millennium (see note 4), directly tested both TV viewing and overall media exposure and found that the bi-modal pattern holds remarkably well.
  24. Peter G. Christenson and Donald F. Roberts, It's Not Only Rock and Roll: Popular Music in the Lives of Adolescents (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Hampton Press, 1998), give even higher estimates. They argue that because music listening is to adolescents typically a secondary or even tertiary activity, it is frequently overlooked when adolescents attempt to account for their time, and is therefore undercounted.
  25. Lenhart, Madden, and Hitlin, Teens and Technology (see note 8).
  26. Rideout and Hamel, The Media Family (see note 4).
  27. Roberts, Foehr, and Rideout, Generation M (see note 5); Roberts and others, Kids and Media at the New Millennium (see note 4). Also see A. F. Albarran and D. Umphrey, “An Examination of Television Motivations and Program Preferences by Hispanics, Blacks, and Whites,” Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 37 (1993): 95–103; Aletha C. Houston and others, Big World, Small Screen: The Role of Television in American Society (University of Nebraska Press, 1992); J. P. Tangney and Seymour Feshbach, “Children's Television Viewing Frequency: Individual Differences and Demographic Correlates,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 14 (1988): 145–58.
  28. Comstock, Television and the American Child (see note 21).
  29. Roberts and others, Kids and Media at the New Millennium (see note 4); Roberts, Foehr, and Rideout, Generation M (see note 5); Comstock and Scharrer, Television: What's On, Who's Watching, and What It Means (see note 3).
  30. Both Roberts and others, Kids and Media (see note 4) and Roberts, Foehr, and Rideout, Generation M (see note 5) used federal estimates of median community income for the zip code area of each participating school as their proxy for household income.
  31. Roberts, Foehr, and Rideout, Generation M (see note 5).
  32. Comstock and Scharrer, Television: What's On, Who's Watching, and What It Means (see note 3), reviews this trend.
  33. Rideout and Hamel, The Media Family (see note 4).
  34. Roberts, Foehr, and Rideout, Generation M (see note 5). Christenson and Roberts, It's Not Only Rock and Roll (see note 24), in their review of adolescents' use of popular music, found that since the 1970s girls have consistently reported more exposure than boys to music media.
  35. Such a scenario is supported by at least one recent study of young children's parents. Rideout and Hamel, The Media Family (see note 4), found that not only do today's parents see the media as important educational tools, but they also report that they are more likely to witness their children imitating positive than negative behaviors observed in the media.
  36. Rideout, Vanderwater, and Wartella, Zero to Six (see note 4); Rideout and Hamel, The Media Family (see note 4).
  37. Roberts, Foehr, and Rideout, Generation M (see note 5).
  38. Ibid.
  39. See, for example, Schramm, Lyle, and Parker, Television in the Lives of our Children (see note 15); Mark Fetler, “Television Viewing and Academic Achievement,” Journal of Communication 34 (1987): 104–18. For extended reviews of the relationship between various measures of academic performance and television exposure see Comstock, Television and the American Child (see note 21); P. A. Williams and others, “The Impact of Leisure-Time Television on School Learning,” American Educational Research Journal 19 (1982): 19–50.
  40. Although concern has been voiced that self-reported grades produce inflated estimates, the ordinal strength of the measure has received validation. Sanford M. Dornbusch and others, “The Relation of Parenting Style to Adolescent School Performance,” Child Development 58 (1987): 1244–57, report a correlation of r=.77 between self-reported grades and actual grade point average.
  41. Roberts and Foehr, Kids and Media in America (see note 3).
  42. See, for example, Hilde T. Himmelweit, A. N. Oppenheim, and Pamela Vince, Television and the Child (London: Oxford University Press, 1958); Eleanor E. Maccoby, “Why Do Children Watch Television?” Public Opinion Quarterly 18 (1954): 239–44; Schramm, Lyle, and Parker, Television in the Lives of Our Children (see note 15); J. P. Tangney, “Aspects of the Family and Children's Television Viewing Content Preferences,” Child Development 59 (1988): 1070–79.
  43. Comstock, Television and the American Child (see note 21), p. 33.
  44. Roberts, Foehr, and Rideout, Generation M (see note 5).
  45. Ulla G. Foehr, Media Multitasking among American Youth: Prevalence, Predictors, and Pairings (Menlo Park, Calif.: Kaiser Family Foundation, 2006); also see Ulla G. Foehr, “Media Multitasking among American Youth: Prevalence, Predictors, and Pairings” (Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation, Stanford University, Stanford, Calif., 2006).
  46. Respondents were assigned as light, moderate, or heavy media multitaskers on the basis of responses to questions asking young people how often they used several media concurrently when using each of four specific media: television, print, audio, computers. Heavy media multitaskers were those who answered “most of the time” to three items and at least “some of the time” to a fourth; Roberts, Foehr, and Rideout, Generation M (see note 5).
  47. That is, the denominator in each of these calculations is the total of all time spent using a medium, whether as a primary or secondary activity; the numerator is the total amount of time spent with that medium that is also shared with any other medium.
  48. It should be noted that there is still debate over whether and the degree to which media multitasking occurs simultaneously or serially (albeit with extremely rapid serial switching). That is, how much processing of information from distinct channels occurs at the same time and how much is the result of switching from one channel to another has not been resolved. The problem is compounded because “medium” is not coextensive with “channel,” and both are independent of content. Television (a medium) includes at least two channels, visual and audio, and possibly a third (for example, when a character reads aloud printed material presented on the screen). Moreover, processing is influenced by content as well as channel (or medium). Thus, for example, while simultaneous processing might operate when watching and hearing a television character read printed material aloud, serial processing might be required when reading a magazine and concurrently watching an unrelated television program (or even listening to music). See, for example, D. E. Meyer and D. E. Kieras, “A Computational Theory of Executive Cognitive Processes and Multiple-Task Performance, Part I, Basic Mechanisms,” Psychological Review 104, no. 1 (1997): 3–65.
  49. Amelia Lenhart, Lee Rainie, and Oliver Lewis, Teenage Life Online: The Rise of the Instant-Messaging Generation and the Internet's Impact on Friendships and Family Relationships (Washington, D.C.: Pew Internet and American Life Project, 2001).
  50. Amelia Lenhart and Mary Madden, Teen Content Creators and Consumers (Washington, D.C.: Pew Internet and American Life Project, 2005) report that over half of U.S. twelve- to seventeen-year-olds have created website content.