Lisa B. Hurwitz

What kind of adults will our children become? The impact of growing up in a media-saturated world

Abstract This article urges children and media scholars to consider the broader consequences of the ubiquitous media environment in which children live today. We consider, within a broader sociocultural context, the ways in which media and interactive technology serve as more knowledgeable others, scaffolding childrens learning and development. Given this context, it is imperative for researchers to consider the consequences of living in the digital age and how broader developmental trajectories may be influenced. We call upon children and media researchers to contemplate more thoughtful research agendas that begin to assess the larger impact of media on children’s learning and developmental trajectories.

Technological Caregiving: Supporting Online Activity for Adults with Cognitive Impairments

With much of the population now online, the field of HCI faces new and pressing issues of how to help people sustain online activity throughout their lives, including through periods of disability. The onset of cognitive impairment later in life affects whether and how individuals are able to stay connected online and manage their digital information. While caregivers play a critical role in the offline lives of adults with cognitive impairments, less is known about how they support and enable online interaction. Using a constructivist grounded theory approach, data from focus groups with caregivers of adults with cognitive impairments reveal four forms of cooperative work caregivers perform in the context of supporting online activity. We find that staying active online is a way of empowering and engaging adults with cognitive impairments, yet this introduces new forms of risk, surrogacy, and cooperative technology use to the already demanding work of caregiving.

Supporting Head Start parents: impact of a text message intervention on parent–child activity engagement

Head Start emphasises parent engagement as a critical strategy in promoting childrens long-term learning. Parents can support childrens positive development by engaging them in stimulating activities. The following study assessed whether a service that delivered parenting tips via text message could prompt parents of children enrolled in Head Start programmes to engage in more learning activities with their children. Two hundred and fifty-six parents participated in the study with approximately half receiving text messages for six weeks. All participants completed a questionnaire about the types of learning activities in which they engaged their children. Parents who received the service engaged in more learning activities; this was particularly true of fathers and parents of boys. Parents reported high rates of satisfaction with service. These results suggest that text-based interventions as a supplement to other forms of family engagement may successfully communicate parenting information and support parental engagement with young children.

Content analysis across new media platforms: Methodological considerations for capturing media-rich data

Content analyses sway policy by describing the prevalence of mass media messages and implying effects. However, content-based research focusing ondynamic new media products such as websites, mobile applications, and video games presents methodological challenges. Our team recently conducted a large-scale content analysis exploring food marketing to children across media platforms, in which we captured and analyzed a variety of media-rich content. We consulted multiple sources to form our sampling frame, employed a complex sampling technique to allow for generalization of findings, used screen-capture software to record our exploration of media products, analyzed data using video coding software, and created a custom scale to determine the target audience of certain media products. We believe the steps we have taken may provide valuable insights into aspiring content analysts interested in studying media-rich content and address challenges that have been plaguing content analysts for the past two decades.

Learning through play: The impact of web-based games on early literacy development

Abstract Education practitioners and policy-makers are enthusiastic about web-based games’ potential to promote reading and pre-reading skills, although it is unclear how effective these games are, especially for children in early childhood. The aim of this study was to determine if literacy games on an educational website could effectively promote early literacy. 136 preschoolers and kindergarteners were randomly assigned to play literacy-focused (intervention group), or puzzle- and arts-themed computer games (control) for 8 weeks at home. Children’s early literacy skills were evaluated pre- and post-intervention via 12 literacy assessments. Children in the intervention group outperformed control group peers on eight of these outcomes. Learning was most pronounced for alliteration and phonics, which are important early predictors of later reading abilities.

“When You’re a Baby You Don’t Have Puberty”: Understanding of Puberty and Human Reproduction in Late Childhood and Early Adolescence

Basic knowledge of human reproduction can help youth prepare for puberty and make later classes focused on advanced reproductive health topics manageable. With the intention of potentially informing the creation of learning materials, we conducted a needs assessment among children ages 7 to 12 in our suburban Chicago community to ascertain their current understanding of, and beliefs and misconceptions about, human reproduction, and to determine their needs for additional reproductive health education. We held qualitative focus group interviews with local children. Participants primarily reported learning about these topics from their parents prior to receiving school-based education in fifth grade. Their level of understanding was relatively low. They had little knowledge of internal sexual organs, expressed a range of beliefs about conception ranging from inaccurate to accurate but incomplete, and voiced concerns about transitioning into adolescence. This suggests a need for additional resources that provide comprehensible descriptions of reproductive health processes and mitigate puberty-related concerns.

Food Marketing to Children Online: A Content Analysis of Food Company Websites

ABSTRACT Since 2006, many U.S. food and beverage companies have pledged to market healthier foods to children to help combat the childhood obesity epidemic. Despite this, companies’ expenditures on online advertising have increased of late. To explore this seemingly contradictory situation, the authors conducted a content analysis of approximately 100 food and beverage brand websites, examining a multitude of online marketing practices across a variety of different products, as well as the relationship between marketing techniques and the nutritional profile of promoted foods. This is the first study to examine if nutrition varied by marketing technique. Few brands maintained child-oriented websites, but the brands that did have child-oriented websites included a large number of games promoting particularly obesogenic food products. Somewhat surprisingly, games with many brand identifiers were paired with slightly less obesogenic foods. These findings present a mixed picture of the threat posed by online child-oriented food marketing.

Facilitating Development Research: Suggestions for Recruiting and Re-Recruiting Children and Families

Recruiting children and families for research studies can be challenging, and re-recruiting former participants for longitudinal research can be even more difficult, especially when a study was not prospectively designed to encompass continuous data collection. In this article, we explain how researchers can set up initial studies to potentially facilitate later waves of data collection; locate former study participants using newer, often digital, tools; schedule families using recruitment phone/email/mail scripts that highlight the many benefits to continued study participation; and confirm appointments with other digital tools. We draw from prior methodological and longitudinal pieces to provide suggestions to others wishing to re-recruit families for longitudinal studies. In addition, we draw upon our own experience conducting a non-prospective longitudinal study 6 years after an educational intervention, in which we successfully re-located 122 (90%) and interviewed 101 of 136 (83% of the located sample and 74% of the full original sample) parents and their early adolescent children. Although the majority of participants were recruited via original contact information (especially phone numbers), using a range of strategies to recruit (e.g., search engines focused on contact information, social media) and motivate participation (e.g., multifaceted phone/email/mail scheduling scripts, flexibility in location and means of participation) yielded a more desirable sample size at relatively low costs.

Mobile marketing to children: a content analysis of food and beverage company apps

• This study examined the nature of US food and beverage company mobile applications (apps) for children.

Communicating Oncofertility to Children: A Developmental Perspective for Teaching Health Messages

Communicating basic health information to children is often a difficult task. It can be particularly challenging with young children, as they know very little about their bodies and struggle to comprehend abstract or hypothetical reasoning. As children get older, they know more about their bodies and health, but talking about complex medical issues and health remains difficult. As oncofertility is a new field that lies at the intersection of oncology and fertility, communicating oncofertility information to children requires not only clear, developmentally appropriate explanations of both health- and medicine-related to cancer but also the discussion of sexuality, fertility, and reproduction. In this chapter, we provide a developmental perspective about what children already know about their bodies and reproductive systems, background on how media is used to communicate health messages to children, and recommendations for how oncofertility experts can use media to educate young audiences.