Original scientific paper
How Parents Perceive Influence of the Media on Preschool Children?
Joško Sindik
; Institute for Anthropological Research, Zagreb
Abstract
Parents play an important role in children’s media literacy, and an essential prerequisite
for children’s media literacy is media literacy of the parents themselves. As a
set of research problems we have examined: correlation between the time of using
three types of media (television, radio and Internet), of parents and their children;
correlation between demographic variables and variables that describe the perceptions
and attitudes that parents have on the way and duration of children’s exposure
to the media influences; differences in variables that describe perception mode and
duration of exposure of children to the influences of the media, in relation to - the
level of parental education, and the number of children per family. The research
was carried out in four kindergardens in the City of Zagreb and Zagreb County,
where 371 parents estimated exposure of the preschool children to the media and
their ways of using them, having applied the appropriately composed questionnaire
‘Preschool children and the media - parents’. The results showed a positive correlation
between the time the use of three types of media (television, radio and
Internet), of both the parents and their children. We have found that, in principle,
older children, and older and working parents with many children in the family,
spend more time with media and use them in diverse ways. We have found a positive
and significant correlation between the level of parental education level and the
mode how child uses computer. It has been shown that children and parents with
higher university degrees do not differ in relation to the duration and modes of using
computers and the remaining types of media (television, radio, some television
programmes), compared with parents with high school education. Finally, we have
found differences in variables of perceptions of methods and duration of exposure
of children to influences of the media in relation to the number of children per
family in families with more children, whereby children more often, longer and in
more different ways consume different types of media (television, radio, computer)
in relation to children from families with fewer children.
Keywords
preschool children; parents; media; media literacy
Hrčak ID:
85379
URI
Publication date:
21.6.2012.
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