Monday, January 25, 2010
Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds
The Kaiser Family Foundation has just released a new report on the media uses of children and young people aged 8 to 18 years within the U.S. The report--
Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds--surveyed a national sample of over 2,000 children and youth, and took into account young people's tendency to multitask with media (finding that on average young people spend 7.5 hours a day engaging with over 10 hours worth of media (e.g., they might listen to music while chatting via instant messenger and working on photoshopping an image to be posted to a discussion board later).
I haven't had time to read the full report, but skimming through the key findings reveals some interesting trends:
- young people's media use has increased noticeably in the past 6 years (since the last report of this type was released by the Foundation).
- the heaviest media users are 11 to 14 year olds, and Black and Hispanic children and youth ("media" in this report includes television and video gaming, which largely accounts for the hours of media use for Black and Hispanic children and youth).
- young people are reading newspapers and websites less online, but reading more books offline.
- children and youth are watching more television, but less and less on their actual TV
- ownership of mobile media has increased significantly among 8 to 18 year olds.
The report seems to focus on hours of media use, rather than kinds of media use (e.g., "computer" is a category of media use, but to what extent this is broken down into what young people are actually doing with the computer remains to be seen)--although this could be the fault of my cursory reading at this point. There also seems to be a strong emphasis in the report on media consumption--it'll be interesting to see what the body of the report has to say about children's and young people's media production.
