These studies had many similarities in how they went about their surveys and collected their information. Both studies gathered information from a children’s perspective. As parents and children have different responses based on the mediation that was enforced, where parents reported restrictive mediation more than children. The final similarity that these studies had was the age of children that they looked at, children from the age of eleven to seventeen (generally middle school kids). I will begin with talking about the first study which was based on academic performance and television …show more content…
Without the guidance from parents, television became a source of the real world for children. The study asked children in the same age range as the first study discussed, and asked questions regarding viewing time and forbidden programs. According to researchers Greenberg, Ericson and Vlahos, they found “inconsistent reporting between parents and their children” (An 395). Previous studies had been designed to collect children’s responses rather than their parents’ responses because children’s reports of parental mediation had been more reliable than parent’s reports. The results had confirmed their hypothesis “as open family communication was negatively related to children’s perceived reality and positively related to perceived negative effects of television” (An 397). This was a very important finding as parents realized that they can use an active mediation style and talk throughout television programs to inform their children of the good/bad things that actors are doing and explain what the program content really means. Television mediation was the first step in new findings in parental mediation theory, but as video games were introduced new studies had to be done to assess the mediation strategies necessary to counteract video game