ROB FOEHR 2008 Trends in Media Use

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Trends in Media Use

VOL. 18 / NO. 1 / SPRING 2008

11

Trends in Media Use

Donald F. Roberts and Ulla G. Foehr

Summary

American youth are awash in media. They have television sets in their bedrooms, personalcomputers in their amily rooms, and digital music players and cell phones in their backpacks.They spend more time with media than any single activity other than sleeping, with the aver-age American eight- to eighteen-year-old reporting more than six hours o daily media use. Thegrowing phenomenon o “media multitasking”—using several media concurrently—multipliesthat gure to eight and a hal hours o media exposure daily.Donald Roberts and Ulla Foehr examine how both media use and media exposure vary withdemographic actors such as age, race and ethnicity, and household socioeconomic status, and with psychosocial variables such as academic perormance and personal adjustment. They notethat media exposure begins early, increases until children begin school, drops o briefy, thenclimbs again to peak at almost eight hours daily among eleven- and twelve-year-olds. Televisionand video exposure is particularly high among Arican American youth. Media exposure is nega-tively related to indicators o socioeconomic status, but that relationship may be diminishing.Media exposure is positively related to risk-taking behaviors and is negatively related to person-al adjustment and school perormance. Roberts and Foehr also review evidence pointing to theexistence o a digital divide—variations in access to personal computers and allied technologiesby socioeconomic status and by race and ethnicity.The authors also examine how the recent emergence o digital media such as personal com-puters, video game consoles, and portable music players, as well as the media multitaskingphenomenon they acilitate, has increased young people’s exposure to media messages whileleaving media use time largely unchanged. Newer media, they point out, are not displacingolder media but are being used in concert with them. The authors note which young people aremore or less likely to use several media concurrently and which media are more or less likely tobe paired with various other media. They argue that one implication o such media multitaskingis the need to reconceptualize “media exposure.”

www.futureofchildren.org

Donald F. Roberts, the Thomas More Storke Proessor Emeritus in the Department o Communication at Stanord University, has spentmore than thirty years conducting research and writing about youth and media. Ulla G. Foehr is a media research consultant special-izing in children and media use behaviors.

Donald F. Roberts and Ulla G. Foehr

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THE FUTURE OF CHILDREN

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merica’s youth are awash inelectronic media. What beganas a media stream hal a century ago has become a torrent whosestrength continues to increase.Beore World War II, mass media availableto young people consisted mainly o print(magazines, newspapers, and books), motionpictures (by then, “talkies” had appeared),and radio (by the end o the 1930s, U.S.households averaged slightly more than oneradio set apiece). Following the war, televi-sion set distribution went rom 0.5 percento households in 1946 to 55 percent in 1956and 87 percent in 1960.

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The media food was just getting started, however. As television’sreach continued to grow—97 percent o U.S.homes had a TV set by 1974, and in 2001the U.S. Census Bureau estimated that U.S.households averaged 2.4 TV sets apiece—newelectronic media began to spring up. Personalcomputers emerged as consumer productsnear the end o the 1970s (the Apple II in1977, the IBM-PC in 1981) and were named

Time

magazine’s “person o the year” in 1982.Personal computers were switly embracedby amilies with children. These computershad penetrated almost a quarter o homes with children between the ages o three andseventeen years by 1989, 70 percent o suchhomes by 2001, and 75 percent by 2003. Simi-larly, the Internet, which became available tothe general population in the early 1990s, wasbeing used at home by 22 percent o three- toseventeen-year-olds in 1997 and by 63 per-cent in 2003.

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Today, not only are American young people surrounded by media in theirhomes and schools, but the portability madepossible by the increased miniaturization o digital media means that they can remainconnected almost anywhere they wish to go.Laptop computers, cell phones, and handheldInternet devices are rapidly becoming basicequipment or today’s teenagers.Hand-in-hand with the growth in media avail-able to young people has been a change inthe content available to them. Today, a sub-stantial part o the media industry is devotedto creating and distributing content speci-cally aimed at children and adolescents. Tele- vision has moved rom amily programming,to children’s programs, to complete channelsaimed at the youth market. The music indus-try relies on ourteen- to twenty-our-year-old consumers. Youth-oriented interactivegames inhabit the TV screen, the computerscreen, an array o handheld devices, andcyberspace. The Internet, originally designedas a communication network or the military and scientists, has morphed into the World Wide Web, with a seemingly endless array o destinations, many designed specically or kids and many more open to, albeit notdesigned or, them. With so many media andso much content available, it is not surprisingthat young people devote much o their timeto media.But how much time? To which media? To what kinds o content? Under what condi-tions? The importance o these questionsshould not be underestimated. Without anaccurate mapping o young people’s me-dia exposure, researchers can never ully understand whether and how media aectthe lives o children and adolescents. Hun-dreds o studies examining media eects onchildren (many o which will be examinedin other articles in this issue) are based onassumptions about exposure. For example,or children to learn rom media content, whether the learning is intended (as with

Sesame Street’

s eorts to teach numbers andletters or Wikipedia’s online explanations o just about anything) or incidental (as withchildren acquiring aggressive behaviors roma video game or materialistic values rom anunending barrage o advertisements), they

Trends in Media Use

VOL. 18 / NO. 1 / SPRING 2008

13

must be exposed to specic kinds o contentunder specic conditions. Questions about whether new ways o structuring inormationinfuence young people’s inormation pro-cessing skills begin with assumptions abouthow much time children spend with dierentorms o media. Likewise, questions about whether and how the time youth devote tomedia aects other areas in their lives, suchas the time spent doing homework or par-ticipating in ater-school activities, dependon accurate measures o that time. In short,almost any question about how media aect young people is predicated on assumptionsabout media exposure.Questions about media use and exposure,however, are not easily answered. The rstdiculty is measurement issues. There isgood reason to question the accuracy both o older children’s sel-reports o media exposureand o parental estimates o the time youngerchildren devote to media.

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Second, untilrecently, relatively ew studies have beenbased on representative samples o U.S. youngsters, making it hard to generalizeresearch ndings to the broader population.Third, many studies, even many recent ones,ocus primarily on a limited array o media,precluding examinations o “media use” asopposed to “television use” or “computeruse.” Finally, each o these problems iscompounded by ongoing changes in themedia environment—changes not only in theorm and substance o media content, but alsoand particularly in the speedy emergence andadoption by young people o a variety o newmedia. For example, cell phones, a relatively rare possession among U.S. adolescents veor six years ago, are rapidly becoming one o teenagers’ avorite new media. In addition,changes in the media environment have madeit necessary to dierentiate between “mediause” and “media exposure.” Estimates o young people’s overall media time that simply sum the amount o exposure to each individu-al medium are no longer valid, i they ever were. Media multitasking—the concurrentuse o multiple media—has become the ordero the day, one result o which is that young-sters report substantially more hours o beingexposed to media content than hours o usingmedia. Such disclaimers notwithstanding,recent research provides a reasonably clearsnapshot o what remains, or better or worse,a moving target.The ollowing examination o U.S. youngpeople’s media use and exposure ocuses onchildren and adolescents ranging in age rombirth to eighteen years. We ocus primarily onrecent studies that have used large, represen-tative samples and gathered inormation onthe ull array o media available to youngpeople. For the most part, inormationconcerning younger children (rom birth toeight years) comes rom three studies con-ducted under the auspices o the KaiserFamily Foundation and is based on parentreports.

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Inormation on older children (eightto eighteen years) comes primarily rom twoother Kaiser Family Foundation surveys o representative samples o school-aged childrenand was obtained through sel-administered

With so many media and so much content available, it is not surprising that young people devote much o their time to media. But how much time? To which media? To what kinds o content?Under what conditions?

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