The Child Effect in Media and Communication Research: A Call to Arms and an Agenda for Research

Correspondence: Jan Van den Bulck, Department of Communication, Katholieke Universitiet Leuven, Van Evenstraat 2 A, 3000 Leuven, Belgium; email: Jan.vandenbulck@soc.kuleuven.ac.be

Communication Yearbook 29, pp. 35-47

JAN VAN DEN BULCK BEA VAN DEN BERGH Katholieke Universiteit Leuven

This article reviews the literature on the child effect and suggests that it is an undervalued approach to studying the way families deal with media and the way they communicate. Even young children play an active part in their own socialization and there are many instances in which it is the child who socializes the parent, rather than the other way around. Media and communication research offers excellent opportunities for studying this child effect because the introduction of new media or new types of content often provides quasi-experimental settings that allow pre-and posttest research designs. Almost all research involving parents or their children may benefi t from this old but often ignored perspective. Media and communication research could play a pivotal role in the development of the child effect hypothesis because both sociology and psychology have largely ignored the idea.