The `Face at the Window' study: a fresh approach to media influence and to investigating the influence of television and videos on children's imagination

Abstract

This article suggests a non-prescriptive notion of the concept of `influence', and points out the shortcomings of simply questioning viewers in attempting to elicit subtle forms of influence by the media. It describes the methodology of a study which took an indirect and multi-pronged approach to investigating how television and videos might exert an influence on the storymaking of 10-12-year-old children. The combination of stories, interviews and other data made it possible to contextualize, rather than isolate, the role of television- and video-viewing in the storymaking and lives of these children. Bringing a variety of qualitative data to bear on the question made it possible also to begin to see, in what has been hypothesized as the `psycho-cultural ecology', how the individual's relationship with and response to the screen is indeed individual, while closely tied in with broader family dynamics, all of which are expressed in storymaking.