We examine whether advertising increases household debt by studying the initial expansion of television in the 1950’s. Exploiting the idiosyncratic spread of television across markets, we use microdata from the Survey of Consumer Finances to test whether households with early access to television saw steeper debt increases than households with delayed access. Results indicate that television in...

BACKGROUND To address evidence-based effective communication skills in the formal academic half day curriculum of our core internal medicine residency program, we designed and delivered an interactive session using excerpts taken from medically-themed television shows. METHODS We selected two excerpts from the television show House, and one from Gray's Anatomy and featured them in conjunction...

Given ongoing developments in the digital television industry, the consumption habits of consumers are substantially influenced by advertisements, which become the main revenue source for TV broadcasters. Therefore, the effective deployment of advertisements is necessary. Digital television is a thriving sector and the number of channels continues to increase, so that the various dimension info...

for Communication Yearbook 15. The resourceful reader:Interpreting television characters and narratives The television viewer is an active interpreter, not a passive recipient, of programs. Viewers'interpretations of programs mediate television effects. The 'active viewer' is accepted by bothtraditional and critical mass communication scholars, allowing for a possible convergence<lb...

One of the main rules subtitling states that subtitles should be formatted and timed so viewers have enough time to read understand text but also follow picture. In this paper we examine factors influence spend looking at subtitles. We concentrate on lexical structural properties The participant group (N = 14) watched a television documentary with Russian narration Finnish (the participants’ na...

We assess the role played by two types of self-selection in accounting for the influence of a television series on smoking cessation. De facto selection is based on respondents' regular channel viewing habits that can expose them to the series. Motivated self-selection takes place when viewers deliberately select to watch television programming because it meets their desire to quit smoking. Sel...

Data suggest that 12%-22% of women smoke during pregnancy. The link between smoking during pregnancy and adverse health and reproductive outcomes has been well documented. Great Start is a public education and smoking cessation program developed especially for pregnant women. Launched in December 2001, Great Start was the first national program focused on providing free and confidential smoking...

This paper describes a multi-media outreach campaign intended to increase children’s knowledge of engineering and to improve the public image of the profession. The central element is a reality-based show entitled Design Squad, whose first season was broadcast on public television stations beginning in the spring of 2007. The show was developed through iterations of prototype episodes and forma...