Center on Media and Child Health

Research Toolbox: Recently Published Books

Recently published titles of interest on the topics of children, media, and health:

New Books

• Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches From the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture By Peggy Orenstein

The author offers a radical, timely wake-up call for parents, revealing the dark side of a pretty and pink culture confronting girls at every turn as they grow into adults.

• CyberSafe Protecting and Empowering Kids in the Digital World of Texting, Gaming, and Social by Media Gwenn Schurgin O’Keeffe, MD, FAAP.

This informative book will guide parents through the landscape of the digital world, helping them better understand things like the history and the future of the Internet, cyberbullying, social networking sites like Facebook and MySpaceGaming and virtual worlds and digital footprints.

• Mediated Girlhoods: New Explorations of Girls' Media Culture by Mary Celeste Kearney (Ed.)

This book is the first anthology devoted specifically to scholarship on girls' media culture. Taking a cultural studies approach, it includes analyses of girls' media representations, media consumption, and media production. The book responds to criticisms of previous research in the field by including studies of girls who are not white, middle-class, heterosexual, or Western, while also including historical research.

• Television Personalities: Stardom and the Small Screen by James Bennett 

This book examines how television personalities function as commodities, and also function ideologically, thus relating them to issues of class, national identity, sexuality, gender and social history.

• The Winter of Our Disconnect: How Three Totally Wired Teenagers (and a Mother Who Slept with Her iPhone) Pulled the Plug on Their Technology and Lived to Tell the Tale  by Susan Maushart  

The author embarked with her three teenagers on a six-month screen blackout (no cellphones, iPods, PCs, laptops, game stations, or television) to discover if the technology intended to stimulate and keep us virtually more connected was, as she suspected, making us actually more disconnected and distracted.

 
Please let us know if you would like to see any books highlighted in the future!

Research Wrap-Up: Recently Published Studies-January 13

New published studies on children, media, and health which explore a range of topics:

Anderson, L. M. & Anderson, J. (2010). Barney and breakfast: Messages about food and eating in preschool television shows and how they may impact the development of eating behaviours in children. Early Child Development and Care,180(10), 1323-1336.

• This study  found that non-nutritious foods  that appear in preschool children’s television shows are as common as nutritious foods and the consumption of non-nutritious food is usually reinforced.

Becker et al. (2011). Social network media exposure and adolescent eating pathology in Fiji. The British Journal of Psychiatry, 198(1),43-50

• The authors found that social network media exposure was associated with eating pathology in this group of adolescent female ethnic Fijians.

Jordan, A.; Bleakley, A.; Manganello, J; Hennessy, M.; Steven,  R., & Fishbein, M. (2010). The role of television access in the viewing time of US adolescents. Journal of Children and Media,  4(4), 355-370.

• The authors found that for adolescents having greater access to TV (number of televisions in the home, having a bedroom TV, and subscribing to premium cable/satellite channels)  was significantly associated with increased television viewing time.

Mendelsohn, A.L., Dreyer, B.P. ; Brockmeyer, C.A.; Berkule-Silberman, S.B.; Huberman, H.S. & Tomopoulos, S.(2011). Randomized controlled trial of primary care pediatric parenting programs: Effect on reduced media exposure in infants, mediated through enhanced parent-child interaction. Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med., 165(1), 42-48.

• This study found that exposure to Video Interaction Project intervention was associated with reduced total duration of media exposure compared with other interventions and control groups. Enhanced parent-child interactions were found to partially mediate relations between VIP and media exposure for families with a ninth grade or higher literacy level .

Sandberg, H.; Gidlof, K. & Holmberg, N.(2011). Children's exposure to and perceptions of online advertising. International Journal of Communication, 5, 21-50.

• The study results suggest that Swedish teenagers are exposed to 10% of all the potential advertisements, but they are mainly unaware of this actual exposure. Food advertisements had the highest impact. FULL TEXT.

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Use the free CMCH Database of Research to find other studies on children, media, and health.