Media Effects, Family Interactions and

Communication is an essential, indispensable element for the formation and maintenance of families. Indeed, social interaction is the vehicle through which family members establish, maintain, and dissolve their intimate relationships. Within this unique social system, the mass media have become an integral, if not routine part of family life. This entry examines some aspects of how the mass media impact interactions within families, focusing on parents, children, and adolescents.

The typical American family home is permeated with media technologies, including multiple television and radio sets, media players, and computers systems, and often, the children are the most avid media consumers. A 2005 study of children 8 to 18 conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation found, for instance, that children spent almost 6½ hours daily using mass media. However, because many children used multiple media simultaneously (referred to as media multitasking), the average total exposure to all media exceeded 8½ hours each day. Media multitasking appears to be facilitated by an abundance of media technologies within the typical child's bedroom. A television (68%) with a VCR/DVD player and video game console (50%) are commonplace, and almost a third of the children in the Kaiser study reported having a computer in their bedroom, many with Internet access. Overall, 86% of the children indicated that there was at least one computer in their home, 75% with Internet access. At the same time, less than half (46%) of the children reported having any family rules about media use, with most of these children stating that such rules were rarely enforced.

The prominence of mass media in the lives of children and adolescents raises several questions: What effect do the media have on family communication? Do the mass media stimulate or impede family interactions? Do the mass media provide an electronic hearth around which family members can congregate or provide a barrier separating individuals? Interestingly, the body of research suggests the answer to all of these questions is yes, highlighting the fact that the relationship between mass media use and family communication is multifaceted and highly interdependent.

Although rapid changes in both the institution of the family and in mass media technologies are not well reflected in contemporary research, some conclusions can be advanced. First, how families define themselves and create a socially constructed set of roles, values, and norms exercises considerable influence over the media experiences of its members. Work explicating family communication patterns, for example, revealed that parents' values and norms regarding communication were predictive of family media habits. Social-oriented parents, for example, emphasize harmony, conformity, and getting along with others, and their families are most likely to use media for social purposes such as solidarity, companionship, and conversation. Concept-oriented parents, on the other hand, encourage expression of ideas, critical thinking, and open debate of opinions, and their families perceive the mass media as tools to instill values and facilitate constructive arguments.

During the 1950s, which are often referred to as the “Golden Age” of television, television was the mass media centerpiece around which the family often gathered. In many contemporary households, this traditional model of media effects on family interactions has been replaced by a rapidly escalating trend towards privatization of mass media use.

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