Young Children's Perceptions of Television Reality: Determinants and Developmental Differences.

@article{Wright1994YoungCP,
  title={Young Children's Perceptions of Television Reality: Determinants and Developmental Differences.},
  author={John Cardinal Wright and Aletha C. Huston and Alice Leary Reitz and Suwatchara Piemyat},
  journal={Developmental Psychology},
  year={1994},
  volume={30},
  pages={229-239}
}
Five- and 7-year-old children judged factuality and social realism of favorite TV shows and test clips in pairs matched for content. In each pair one was news or documentary format, the other fictional drama. All children understood that fictional programs were not factual. Children correctly discriminated the purposes and intended audience of news from those of documentaries. Children discriminated factuality by genre of program, and genre of program by formal production features and by… 
View via Publisher
cdmc.georgetown.edu
137 Citations
Highly Influential Citations
7
Background Citations
37
Methods Citations
4
Results Citations
2

Figures and Tables from this paper

137 Citations

Effects of documentary and fictional television formats on children's acquisition of schemata for unfamiliar occupations

Perceived television reality and children's emotional and cognitive responses to its social content

"Vámonos means go, but that's made up for the show": reality confusions and learning from educational TV.

Examination of 3- to 5-year-olds' reality judgments and the implications for their learning suggests that reality distinctions improve with age, contributing to children's learning.

Learned and Remembered But Rejected: Preschoolers’ Reality Judgments and Transfer From Sesame Street

Older children remembered the information better than younger children, but memory only predicted transfer if the information was remembered as real, and all ages became increasingly skeptical about the reality of both the educational and fantasy content.

Occupational portrayals on television: children's role schemata, career aspirations, and perceptions of reality.

Children form separate schemata for social information acquired from TV and from real-world experience, but those who perceive television as socially realistic are apt to incorporate TV messages in theirSchemata and their aspirations.

US preschoolers’ trust of and learning from media characters

Abstract The current study examined the relations between children’s perceptions of character social realism, identification with characters, trust of characters as knowledgeable informants, and…

Fact or Fiction? Children’s Preferences for Real Versus Make-Believe Stories

Some children and adults are more drawn to the imaginary than others. Here, we examine whether developmental differences also play a role in the degree to which individuals are drawn to make-believe…

Development of beliefs about storybook reality.

Children of all ages who heard realistic stories made more claims that the events in the stories could happen in real life than did children who heard fantastical stories, and a growing awareness of the basic nature of realistic fiction was indicated.

Does Perceived Realism Really Matter in Media Effects?

Memory, perceived realism, and emotional responses to documentary and fictional film excerpts were investigated experimentally using adult participants. Documentary stimuli were perceived as more…

Factual and evaluative approaches to modifying children's responses to violent television

An experiment with 5-7- and 10-12-year-old children compared 2 approaches to mediating children's violent television viewing. Factual mediation provided children with facts about a violent program's…
...

References

SHOWING 1-10 OF 45 REFERENCES

Age and Content Influences on Children's Perceptions of the Realism of Television Families: A Replication and Extension.

A previous study of the perceived social realism of television series featuring families was both replicated and extended with a sample of 1692 second, sixth, and tenth graders in 42 schools in…

The Dimensional Structure of Children's Perceptions of Television Reality

Children's awareness of the dramatic and unreal nature of most of television (perceived reality) has been proposed as playing an important part in children's responses to television, although there…

Children and the Perceived Reality of Television

Children's perceptions of reality in television are examined as an intervening variable between exposure to the medium and the effect of TV messages. Findings from previous work and data from…

Family ecology and child characteristics that predict young children's educational television viewing.

"Sesame Street" viewing increased from age 3 to a peak between the ages of 3 1/2 and 4; thereafter, viewing declined; this developmental change appeared to be a function of age-correlated life events and perceived age appropriateness of the program rather than of ontogenetic cognitive change.

Estimates of young children's time with television: a methodological comparison of parent reports with time-lapse video home observation.

Of 3 types of parent estimates of 5-year-old TV viewing, concurrent diaries correlated best with video observation and produced a very small absolute mean time error, and direct parent Estimates of typical time spent viewing produced smaller correlations and large overestimates as compared with diaries.

Television and behavior : ten years of scientific progress and implications for the eighties

This volume provides an update and elaboration of information presented in the 1972 Report of the Surgeon Generals Advisory Committee on Television and Behavior. It focuses on cognitive and affective…

The development of children's knowledge about the appearance-reality distinction.

Children of 11 to 12 years, and to an even greater degree college students, give evidence of possessing a substantial body of rich, readily available, and explicit knowledge in this area of knowledge acquisition.

Reasoning about the Realities on Television: A Developmental Study. Technical Report No. 18.

Children's reality‐fantasy judgments about television shift, with age, from a focus on physical features and a rigid assessment of actuality, to a sensitivity to the plausibility of characters and…

Television and families: what do young children watch with their parents?

Results support the assertion that parental viewing preferences, habits, and orientations toward television influence children's viewing, both with and without parents.

Children and Television: A Semiotic Approach

There are insights of interest and value to all in these pages. This book develops a fresh and insightful approach to the questions of children and television. Drawing on recent work in linguistics…