ABSTRACT
Media eff ects research has long been conducted by scholars from disciplines as diverse as developmental psychology, communication, sociology, and ethnographic-cultural studies. The entry of health researchers into this fi eld, led by pediatricians concerned about negative health eff ects of television viewing, has contributed to an increased public awareness of media eff ects and added a medical perspective to the study of media’s infl uence on young people. Pediatricians are unique among scholars of media eff ects because their discipline focuses on preventing disease and playing a direct role in guiding parents to optimize the physical, mental, and social development of their children. Pediatricians, therefore, are in an infl uential position for making recommendations and implementing them into practice. Concern about the eff ects of violence in media found by social scientists, followed by the rise in the childhood obesity rate in the fi nal few decades of the twentieth century, motivated pediatricians to develop clinical practice recommendations and advocate for changes in public policy. Although pediatricians have been engaging with the science of media eff ects for decades, recently, starting around the turn of the twenty-fi rst century, there has been a
ABSTRACT Although the study of media and children has long been interdisciplinary, child health researchers and pediatric journals have joined their social science counterparts to investigate media eff ects over the past several decades. Research on how media use infl uences child health and development has increased exponentially in pediatric journals between the early 1990s and the present. Communication and psychology scholars have begun to publish their media eff ects work in medical journals. Health researchers, who previously synthesized existing science on media eff ects into policy statements and recommendations, now conduct original research. In this article, we review this transformation by documenting publication patterns in journals from diff erent disciplines and discussing possible explanations for the shift. We consider the benefi ts and challenges presented by this evolution in the study of media and children, and postulate about how it has shaped the future direction of research and policy.
