ABSTRACT
I fi rst joined the media research community when I launched the Children & Media Program for the advocacy group Children Now in 1993. At that time, I was surprised at the dearth of even the most basic types of national data on children’s media use, including which types of media young people use, how often, and for how long, broken out by age, gender, and other demographic and socioeconomic categories. In the 23 years since then, the challenge of eff ectively measuring the time children spend with media-at a national level-has grown exponentially more complex, and has continued to vex the US research community.
