Coviewing

Coviewing, the shared experience of media use among two or more individuals, represents one way in which parents and other significant adults exert an influence over the uses and effects of media by and on children and adolescents. In media effects research, coviewing usually refers to parents and children watching television together. More recently, some scholars have broadened their definition to include co-use of the Internet and gaming technologies. Coviewing provides children with an opportunity to observe their parents as models of appropriate media use behavior but represents a relatively passive intervention strategy. Other routes to parental influence include general communication norms, explicit rule making, and active discussion of media, usually referred to as mediation, active mediation, instructive mediation, or evaluative guidance.

Analysts need to distinguish between coviewing and active mediation because coviewing can occur with or without discussion. Despite the popular view that coviewing should benefit children, coviewing's value is questionable if done without significant evaluative discussion. Often, parents and children watch television together without discussing media content or without discussing it critically, doing so primarily because they like the content and want to share time together. As a result, children appear to interpret coviewing as endorsement. Accordingly, scholars have found that coviewing can increase perceived realism, the learning of aggression, and positive attitudes toward violence and sex.

Parents tend to coview less with older children than with younger children. More frequent coviewers tend to use media more heavily, to speak more positively about television content, to consider television a useful tool, and to possess a more control-oriented communication style. Coviewing appears to be uncorrelated with critical discussion and tends to be positive more often than negative. Nevertheless, while insufficient on its own, coviewing can provide the impetus for discussing issues difficult to bring up in another context, and it can cultivate positive family relationships.

From a theoretical point of view, it appears to matter little which medium is under scrutiny. Although less research exists on parental co-use of new technologies, Peter Nikken and Jeroen Jansz have demonstrated that, as with television coviewing, parents and children tend to play video games together when parents believe that the games have socioemotional benefits. Further paralleling the findings of the television-based studies, Nikken and Jansz have found that what they call conscious coplaying occurs more often among parents who play more often themselves and who have younger children.

To measure coviewing, scholars most commonly isolate coviewing behavior from motivations and discussion, often using global measures and more recently measuring it across genres for added reliability and precision. Patti Valkenburg and colleagues have employed a construct called social coviewing, which [Page 224]incorporates motivational characteristics, behavioral patterns, and affirmative discussion. Scholars have suggested that future research should examine the implications of children's perceptions versus parents' perceptions, which often differ, continue to investigate the implications of passive and active communication patterns between significant adults and children, and expand studies to explore the ramifications of peer-to-peer coviewing and coplaying.