Television Content Under Scrutiny
For many years, child experts have worried that attention problems such as ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) could be related to children's poor television viewing habits. Many research studies have attempted to look at the effects of TV in terms of quantity.
Finally, in 2007, researchers from the University of Washington published a study that focused in on the effects of different types of content. In particular, Frederick Zimmerman and Dimitri Christakis sought to answer two important questions:
Is the association between early television viewing and subsequent attentional problems moderated by the type of content viewed?
Are the first 3 years of life a critical age range within which children are more vulnerable to the effects of media than is the case at later ages?
Their research involved retrospectively examining the results of questionnaires filled out by parents in 1997, and again in 2002, as part of the Panel Survey of Income Dynamics (PSID), a longitudinal study overseen by the US's National Science Foundation.
As part of the questionnaire, parents used time diaries to record their children's viewing of specific TV programs. Some have criticized this method of data collection, but write the researchers, "Such time diaries have been used extensively in research and have excellent validity when compared with direct observation of activities."
Since the researchers wanted to test whether children under the age of 3 were more vulnerable to the effects of TV than older children, they divided their sample into children who were under 3 in 1997, and children who were over 3 but under 5. (Children over 5, or whose parents did not fill out the questionnaire both times were not included in the study.) There were a total of 560 samples for the 0-3 age group, and 407 for the 4-5 age group.
Television programs were divided into three categories: educational, nonviolent entertainment, and violent. Examples of educational programs included Barney, Sesame Street, and Winnie the Pooh. Examples of nonviolent entertainment included the Flintstones, the Aristocats, and Rugrats. Examples of violent shows included Space Jam, Lion King, and Power Rangers.
As part of the PSID, parents were asked to answer questions about their child's behavior. It was not within the scope of the study to formally diagnose children with attention problems, but write the researchers, "Our dependent variable used the 'hyperactive' scale of the BPI [Behavior Problems Index], which has been validated and extensively used in published research."
As a result of their study, Zimmerman and Christakis drew the following conclusions:
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Early television viewing is associated with the subsequent development of problems with attention regulation.
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The association is specific to noneducational television, particularly violent content.
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The association is specific to exposure before age 3.
In other words, as long as the content was educational, watching TV was not damaging to any of the children - not even the youngest ones. Once children were over the age of 3, no type of content was found to be damaging. (It should be noted that all of the content - even that classed as "violent" - consisted of children's programs.)