This week, PhD student Brandon Willsie will discuss his ideas and research on the topic of parental active mediation of children's television viewing. The title of his talk is "Predicting and Protecting: Building a Conditional Model of Active Mediation." The abstract for his talk is below.
Children's television content has long been a concern of parents and researchers alike. The technique of an adult co-viewer engaging a child in conversation about mass media messages is known as activemediation and is seen as one way of mitigating harmful media effects on youth. The current study places the study of active mediation within a conditional model of media influence. When placing extant research on active mediation within this framework, it becomes evident that little focus has been given to understanding what predicts this potentially important parental behavior. This study focuses on assessing the predictive value of a host of pre-media use individual-difference variables relative to the dependent variable of active mediation and the development of a functional conditional framework which may be applied to the study of active mediation.
