Children's Perceptions of Televised Fiction

A number of researchers in this area make no clear distinction between “true,” “realism,” “reality,” and “real.” See Noble G. , Children in Front of the Small Screen, (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1975); Korzenny F. , “The Perceived Reality of Television and Aggressive Predispositions among Children in Mexico,” paper presented to the annual meeting of the International Communication Association, 1976; Greenberg B.S. Reeves B. , “Children and the Perceived Reality of Television,” Journal of Social Issues, Vol 32, No. 4 (1976), pp. 86–97; Reeves B. , Children's Perceived Reality of Television & the Effects of Pro- and Anti- Social TV Content on Social Behavior (Washington, D.C.: Office of Child Development, 1977), Report No. 3; Hawkins R.P. , “The Dimensional Structure of Children's Perceptions of Television Reality,” Communications Research, Vol. 4, No. 3 (1977), pp. 299–321; and Lemon , 1976. “Realism” in this study means “like real life.”

Since the study dealt with second and fifth graders, the term “children” refers to these, unless further qualified.

See, on replies to open- and closed- end questions, Schuman H. Presser S. , “New Wine in Old Bottles: Open versus Closed Questions,” paper presented at the American Association for Public Opinion Research, June 1978; and Vaillancourt P.M. , “Stability of Children's Survey Responses,” Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 37, No. 3 (1973), pp. 373–387.

See Flapan D. , Children's Understanding of Social Interaction (New York: Teachers College, 1968); Hartley R.L. , The Impact of Viewing “Aggression”: Studies and Problems of Extrapolation (New York: Columbia Broadcasting System, Office of Social Research, 1964); Leifer A.D. Roberts D.F. , “Children's Responses to Television Violence,” in Murray J.P. Rubinstein E.A. Comstock G.A. (eds.), Television and Social Behavior, Vol. 2: Television and Social Learning. (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1972); and Noble , op. cit.

See Halloran J.D. , “On the Research Approaches for Studying Socialization in the Family,” in Internationale Zeitschrift für Medienpsychologie und Medienpraxis (ed.), Television and Socialization Processes in the Family (München: Verlag Documentation, 1975); von Feilitzen C. , “Findings of Scandinavian Research on Child and Television in the Process of Socialization,” in Internationale Zeitschrift für Medienpsychologie und Medienpraxis (ed.), Television and Socialization Processes in the Family (München: Verlag Documentation, 1975); Brown R. , Introduction in Brown R. (ed.), Children and Television (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1976); McCron R. , “Changing Perspectives in the Study of Mass Media and Socialization,” in Halloran J. (ed.), Mass Media and Socialization (Leeds, England: A. Kavanagh & Sons, 1976); Chandler M.J. , “Social Cognition: A Selective Review of Current Research,” in Overton W.F. Gallagher J.M. (eds.), Knowledge and Development, Advances in Research and Theory, Vol. I (New York, Plenum Pub., 1977); Comstock G.A. , “The Impact of Television on American Institutions, Journal of Communication, Vol. 28, No. 2 (1978), pp. 12–28.

See Flavell J.H. , Development Psychology of Jean Piaget (Princeton, N.J.: D. Van Nostrand, 1963); Piaget J. Inhelder B. , Psychology of the Child (New York: Basic, 1969); Wackman D.B. Wartella E. , “A Review of Cognitive Development Theory and Research and Discussion of Implications for Research on Children's Responses to Television Advertising,” paper prepared for the Ford Foundation Seminar, December 1973; Klapper H.L. , “Cognitive Development in Television Perception,” Journal of Educational Television, Vol. 2, No. 1 (1976), pp. 109–112. According to Piaget, children aged six to seven through ten to eleven are in this cognitive stage.

Brown , op. cit.

Brown , op. cit.; Chandler op. cit.; Piaget J. , “The Role of Action in the Development of Thinking,” in Overton W.F. Gallagher J.M. (eds.), Knowledge and Development, Advances in Research and Theory, Vol. 1 (New York: Plenum Pub., 1977).

Wiese M. Cole S. , “A Study of Children's Attitudes and the Influence of Commercial Films,” Journal of Psychology, Vol. 21 (1946), pp. 51–71; Klapper H.L. , “Did Anyone Do Anything that Would Be Wrong for You To Do?” Paper presented at the American Association for Opinion Research, May 1969; Klapper , op. cit.; Noble , op. cit.; Hawkins , op. cit.

“Do you think the children you see on TV are a lot like you and your friends or are they kind of different?” “How about the fathers you see on TV shows? Are they a lot like fathers in real life, or are they kind of different? What do you think?”

Greenberg Reeves in their study of perceived realism of television, report that “perceptions of the reality of TV increase as specificity of content increases” (p. 86)—the more specific the topic asked about, the more likely children were to term it “real-to-life.” As will be shown below, neither the responses of the total sample here nor those of our two age-grade subgroups support their finding. (Note their use of “reality” as a synonym for “realism.”) Perhaps where the method uses paper and pencil and closed-end questions, children more often agree that a topic is realistic in large part because the topic is explicit, clear. Given the specificity of the referent, children more often could think of some trait which to them was realistic. (See footnote 1.)

See Comstock , op. cit.; and, from the Office of Child Development, a brief description of children at various stages of cognitive development (no further identification given), September 1972. On the consistency of children's beliefs, see Greenberg Reeves , op. cit.; Comstock , op. cit.; Reeves , op. cit.; and Dominick J.R. Greenberg B.S. , “Mass Media Functions among Low Income Adolescents,” in Greenberg B.S. Dervin B. (eds.), Use of the Mass Media by the Urban Poor (New York: Praeger, 1970); and Hawkins , op. cit.

The method of reporting used by Greenberg Reeves , op. cit., unfortunately obscures inter- and intra-individual variations. However, their data in Table 2 (p. 92) suggest that the children they tested showed the same inconsistency by topical area. The method of reporting most often is an “average” score on a set of some three to five items. See Greenberg , op. cit.; and McLeod J.M. Atkin C.K. Chaffee S.H. , “Adolescents, Parents and Television Use: Self-Report and Other-Report Measures from the Wisconsin Sample,” in Murray J.P. Rubinstein E.A. Comstock G.A. (eds.), Television and Social Behavior, Vol. 3: Television and Adolescent Aggressiveness (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1972). In the latter study the “average” response of nine and ten year olds is “that they are uncertain just how real to life television is.” Another possible interpretation is that most of these children said some aspects of television were realistic and some aspects were not. Reeves supports this last interpretation.

See, on children's learning, Collins W.A. , “Learning of Media Content, A Developmental Study,” Child Development, Vol. 41 (1970), pp. 1133–1142; Katzman N.I. , “Violence and Color Television, What Children of Different Ages Learn,” in Murray J.P. Rubinstein E.A. Comstock G. A. (eds.), Television and Social Behavior, Vol. 5: Television's Effects, Further Explorations (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1972); on their perceptions, Flapan , op. cit.; Leifer Robert op. cit.; Klapper , op. cit.; on Piagetian theory, see Piaget J. , The Origin of Intelligence in the Child (London: Routledge, 1953); Bruner J.S. “The Course of Cognitive Growth,” American Psychologist, Vol. 19, No. 1 (1964), pp. 1–15; and Chandler , op. cit.

On TV characters, Greenberg Reeves , op. cit., state, “The people, the actors, the heroines are very alive and realistic to the child viewer,” (p. 94) and to them this is a source of considerable “concern.” This generalization and the concern expressed both derive from unprobed closed-end questions. The quotations cited above suggest their concern is unfounded.

It is difficult to quantify this distinction. Two coding schemes were tried but did not adequately differentiate between statements that were not near either extreme. By a rough, partly quantitative, partly qualitative gauge, no more than half the second-graders cited motives, consequences, interpersonal relations, or similarly socially meaningful replies.

Lamal P.A. , “Imitation Learning of Information-Processing,” Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, Vol. 12, No. 2 (1971), pp. 223–227; Laughlin P.R. Moss I.L. Miller S.M. , “Information Processing in Children as a Function of Adult Model, Stimulus Display, School Grade, and Sex,” Journal of Educational Psychology, Vol. 60 (1969), pp. 188–193; Denney D.R. , “The Effects of Exemplary and Cognitive Models and Self-Rehearsal on Children's Interrogative Strategies,” Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, Vol. 19, No. 3 (1975), pp. 476–488; and Chandler , op. cit.

See Hoffman M.L. , “Identification and Imitation in Children,” unpublished paper (1977), summary and critique of Zimmerman and Rosenthal's 1974 review of the literature on generalization and transfer to “novel and unfamiliar” settings.

See Piaget Inhelder , op. cit.; Hoffman , op. cit.; and Sigel I.E. , “The Attainment of Concepts,” in Hoffman M.L. Hoffman L.W. (eds.), Review of Child Development Research, Vol. 1 (New York: Russell Sage, 1964).

See Greenberg Dervin , op. cit.; Noble , op. cit.; Greenberg Reeves , op. cit.; Hawkins , op. cit.; Comstock , op. cit.; and Ryan K. , “Television as a Moral Educator,” in Adler R. Cater D. (eds.), Television as a Cultural Force (New York: Praeger, 1976).

Reeves , op. cit.

Both behavior and perceived realism of television were measured by closed-end questions. All behavioral measures were reports by the child and some dealt with contingent behavior.