Children and Television

Book excerpt: This seminal volume is a comprehensive review of the literature on children's television, covering fifty years of academic research on children and television. The work includes studies of content, effects, and policy, and offers research conducted by social scientists and cultural studies scholars. The research questions represented here consider the content of programming, children's responses to television, regulation concerning children's television policies, issues of advertising, and concerns about sex and race stereotyping, often voicing concerns that children's entertainment be held to a higher standard. The volume also offers essays by scholars who have been seeking answers to some of the most critical questions addressed by this research. It represents the interdisciplinary nature of research on children and television, and draws on many academic traditions, including communication studies, psychology, sociology, education, economics, and medicine. The full bibliography is included on CD. Arguably the most comprehensive bibliography of research on children and television, this work illustrates the ongoing evolution of scholarship in this area, and establishes how it informs or changes public policy, as well as defining its role in shaping a future agenda. The volume will be a required resource for scholars, researchers, and policy makers concerned with issues of children and television, media policy, media literacy and education, and family studies.