Growing UD With Television

Previous research concerning the effects of television on children has tended to focus upon the learning of social behaviors and attitudes (2,4,5). That children’s age-related cognitive limitations would affect their perceptions of television programming and presumably mediate learning seems evident, yet this area is only now coming under frequent discussion. The purpose of this study was to explore children’s understanding of the nature of television characters by assessing their abilities to differentiate between human, animated, and puppet characters. Researchers who have investigated developmental differences in children’s perceptions about television have commonly used questionnaire or rating scale measures to assess children’s evaluations of television content. Rubin (9) found that nine-year-old children were more likely to agree that “television presents things as they really are in life” than were 13and 17-year-old adolescents. Blatt, Spencer, and Ward (1) interviewed kindergarteners, second-, fourth-, and sixth-graders about the nature of commercials and of commercial characters. They found that fourthand sixth-graders fully grasped the fundamental “reality” or “non-reality” of the characters and situations portrayed on commercials. The kindergarteners and second-graders, however, had difficulty making such