Abstract
Research exploring the ways older children and adolescents interact with and make sense of television is providing us with a fascinating picture of active viewers who use various strategies to assess the extent to which television content relates to real life. The preschooler has not received the same research attention although considerable anxiety exists over the effects that television may have on the young viewer. At the heart of this concern lie questions regarding the child's ability to distinguish between fantasy and reality in television content.
In this article, five 4-year-olds talk about how ‘real’ they think some TV characters are and from their discussions there emerges a picture of active, thinking viewers not the passive, mesmerised children so often constructed in public debate. These children are aware that TV images are representations which have varying degrees of relationship to things in the ‘real’ world. Some of their working hypotheses about these degrees of relationship are presented here.
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