Center on Media and Child Health

Speak up! Commenting Improved

The "comment" feature of this blog was previously open only to those with a TypePad account.  This has been changed so that ANYONE can join the conversation as long as they have a valid email address. 

We hope this encourages readers to respond to topics that intrigue or challenge them.  Under any post you'd like to comment on, just click the "comments" link to get to a page where you can compose and submit your statement. 

CMCH Initiative: Guest Bloggers

This post was written by CMCH Director Dr. Michael Rich:

One of the founding philosophies of CMCH was to provide a “village square” where researchers investigating any aspect of media influence on child health and development could exchange ideas, questions, concerns, and resources. Our field has long been hobbled by scant funding, limited communication among researchers (especially those in different academic disciplines), and missed opportunities, in terms of unnecessarily duplicated studies, incomplete or ineffective studies that could have been better accomplished in another field, and powerfully synergistic collaborations that never occurred.

To facilitate dialogue, networking, and potential collaborations, CMCH would like to invite you, our subscribers, to become “guest bloggers.” The idea would be to share the work that you and your institutions are doing, to explore the areas in which you need or seek help, and to open discussions of key questions this field is facing.

In this spirit, I’d like to share descriptions of my 3 current projects in hopes that those who are working in these areas will feel welcome to join us in collegial dialogue and possibly collaboration:

• Developing and implementing a new, more comprehensive and sensitive data collection method for assessing media exposure in a complex, multitasking environment
• Conducting a follow-up to my 2001 study of what pediatricians in training are taught regarding media effects
• Applying Video Intervention/Prevention Assessment (VIA) (the method where kids are given camcorders to make video diaries of their illness experiences) to better understand overweight in childhood and adolescence.

Please feel free to reach out to us if you wish to discuss any of these projects or to contribute a similar description of your own research directions as a guest blogger. No experience with blogging is required, you just compose the text. 

By seeking collaboration of our strengths, we will be more powerful and effective as a community of researchers. Come join us the in the “global village square.”

3 Ways to Participate in the CMCH Blog

While the CMCH blog is maintained by Brandy King, the CMCH librarian, readers are encouraged to participate in making this a unique information resource about news and research on media and child health.  Please consider participating in one of three ways:

1. Send us news or research!  If you see or hear a news story on media effects, or know of any recent research that you think other readers would be interested in, send me an email .  Please include any information on where you saw or heard the story or research, and any relevant links, and Brandy will consider using the information for a blog topic (if used, your name can be mentioned if you'd like). 
2. Comment on something already written!  At the bottom of each post, there is a link for "Comments."  If you click on it, you will be taken to a screen where you can respond to the post.  Do you think the study has merit?  Is there a flaw in the methodology?  Are you doing similar research?  You must be a registered TypeKey user to comment, but the account is free.
3. Become a guest blogger!  Are you interested in adding a post or two to this blog?  You can sign up for one post or agree to post about anything news-worthy in a particular week.  Just email me and let me know what you're interested in, what your background in this area is, and what you think you might like to post about.  You don't necessarily need to learn to use the blogging technology -- you can send me entries by email and I can post them for you. 

How To Subscribe To This Blog

Subscribing through email:

1. On the left-hand panel, find the empty white box labeled "Enter your email"
2. Enter the email address where you want to received notification about the CMCH blog
3. Click the “Subscribe Me” button
4. When you receive an email from FeedBlitz, click the link to confirm your subscription
5. You will receive an email each time the CMCH blog is updated

Subscribing through an RSS feed:

1. On the left-hand panel, scroll to the section called “Subscribe by RSS and Email”
2. If you use either a Bloglines or Yahoo feed-reader, click on either button to subscribe and your reader will collect the feeds each time the CMCH blog is updated.
3. If you use another feed reader, follow their instructions for adding a feed. Our RSS feed is at http://feeds.feedburner.com/CenterOnMediaAndChildHealth

About CMCH and the CMCH Blog

After a year of listening to my colleagues in other libraries rave about their blogs, I decided it was time for CMCH to join the crowd.  Welcome to our brand-new blog! 

The Center on Media and Child Health is a project of Children's Hospital Boston, Harvard Medical School, and Harvard School of Public Health.  We are an interdisciplinary research group dedicated to investigating the effects of all kinds of media (television, video games, magazines, the Internet, etc.) on children's mental, physical and social health.  Our group is small but full of enthusiasm and a collaborative spirit!  To learn more about us, please visit our website: www.cmch.tv

On this blog, I will post stories related to media and child health -- news from CMCH as well as news from around the country and the world about scientific research and other current events that may impact the study of this important topic.