A presentation by PhD. Satu Valkonen in My Media Playground seminar 14th February in Tampere, Finland.

1. Satu Valkonen
The Mannerheim
League for Child
Welfare

2. The Significance of the Television in
Children’s Everyday Lives
The research explores how meanings of
television are produced and formulated, and
how children’s life experiences are present in the
interpretations they make
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3. • One of the main goals of this research is to analyse
children’s active role in the meaning making process
• The research emphazises the view that children develop
while participating in cultural and societal action
• Socialization - Interpretive reproduction
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4. The research data
• 60 interviews with 5 to 6-year-old children
- Children’s social relationships
- Fears
- Nightmares
- Views about the television
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5. • 50 questionnaires for parents
- A basic information form
- A question sheet about children’s television use
- A question sheet about children’s sleep
- A pediatric psychiatry form
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6. Cultural, interactional & experiental
perspective
Cultural
-Children’s everyday life (television law and regulation, family life, childrens
day care, hobbies, television environment at home etc.)
Interactional
- TV in social relationship between children and their parents
- TV in social relationship with children
Experiential
-Engaging TV content
-Frightening TV content
- TV in children’s nightmares
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7. Results
• Children are watching television content forbidden under 7 or 11 years
•Television at home (parents questionnaires, N=50)
- 49 has 1 television, 18 has 2 television, 3 has 3 television
- 7 children have own television
• Children’s chance to watch TV depends on their family schedule
(work, hobbies) and values (when and how long)
• Children watch TV about an hour daily, at weekend little more.
- Some watch 5 hours per week or less, some over 14 hours per week
• Children watch children’s programs, nature documentary, whole family
shows, some watch soap operas or drama
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8. Results
• Parents, childen & TV
- Regulation: 42 parents have rules when to watch
television, 48 what not to watch and 47 how long to watch.
- Sense of closeness – apart
• Children with their peers & TV
- Watching TV
- Play
- Commercial stuff
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9. Results
• Engaging TV content: empowerment, identification
- Entertaining, exciting, funny
• Television induced fears: identification
- About 80% of children told about television induced fear
- About 80% of all fears are related to television
- Almost 40% of parents thought that their child never has
television induced fear
- Television induced fear related to fantasy vs. realisty, fictional
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10. Results
• Television and nightmares: identification
- About 25% told about TV when telling bad dreams ;
about 30% of those who told the bad dream
- TV-characters are in trouble, universal threat, family in
danger & child in trouble
- About 70% of parents thought that their child never has
bad dream related to TV
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11. The key elements
• Participation
- Children’s active actions (e.g. negotiations about
rules, constructing closeness, dealing televisio
experiences)
• Emotional involvement
- Identification (television characters, television stories)
- Controlling involvement (media competence)
NB! Reccurence of phenomenon will strenghten the
meanings children make about television
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12. Conclusion
• The significance of television is strongly
associated with personal development where
children construct an understanding of
who I am and what the world is like.
• Television can be used as a certain kind of
mediacultral looking glass for concepts about
self and the world.
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13. Thank you!

14. Session 2: Families and Media
• PhD, Dr. Michal Alon-Tiroch: Instilling News
Consumption at Home
• PhD, Research fellow Kadri Ugur: Adults on the
Playground: shaperons, playmates or drama directors
• Phd, Lecturer Agata Walczak-Niewiadomska & PhD
candidate Ewelina Makowska: A Role of the Family in
the Media Education of the preschool in Poland
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