ABSTRACT
While television was in its infancy Paul Lazarsfeld (1955),1 in testimony before the Kefauver Committee on Juvenile Delinquency, called for a comprehensive program to study not only the effects of the new medium of television, but other “unorthodox kinds of studies which would add to our understanding” of these effects (p. 247). Unorthodox studies, according to Lazarsfeld, included collaborative and long-term research and studies of the family and of those involved in the creative process. Lazarsfeld argued for a well-funded, centralized organization or foundation to carry this agenda forward. Unfortunately, although the Surgeon General’s studies published in the 1970s were no doubt the model Lazarsfeld had in mind, rarely have his words been heeded. As we see here, much of the research in the field of children and television has been underfunded, short-term, isolated, uncoordinated studies carried out in the kind of seclusion he called “the accidental initiative of individual scholars” (p. 244). There are exceptions, of course, as illustrated by several of the contributors to this book, who have built organizations and institutes within their universities. We in the field tend to collaborate
where possible with students, mentors, and colleagues-a process made more possible by the Internet-but for the most part Congress ignored Lazarsfeld’s appeal and left the research on this “burning social issue” (p. 244) to the vagaries of the academic climate.
