ABSTRACT
Many questions remain about the nature and extent of media influence on children and adolescents. The number of content, viewer, and contextual variables and their interactions in this field is enormous. The study of content variables is in many ways the easiest, although it is still a huge task. Content can include everything from animation to live news broadcasts, from advertisements for makeup to graphic violence, and from sitcoms to historical documentaries. The content of TV programs, video games, magazine articles, and other media can be coded, graphed, analyzed, and compared, and accurate statistics can be derived about the number of portrayals of men versus women, Blacks versus Whites, number of incidents of violence, commercials per hour, or other variables.
