Center on Media and Child Health

Insight into Children's Lives through Videotape

Next week, the TLC network will premiere "My Life As A Child" -- a TV show where 20 children were chosen to videotape their lives over a period of 4 months.  The topics these kids cover are anything but childish.  The preview of the show touches on racism, social class issues, sexism and disabilities, all discussed by children under 12 years old who have already dealt with these situations. 

One of our projects, Video Intervention/Prevention Assessment (VIA), takes a similar approach to learning about children's lives.  For the last 13 years, VIA participants aged 8 and older have videotaped their own lives, giving an inside look at what it's like to live with chronic illness.  After using qualitative analysis methods to find commonalities and differences between participants, VIA researchers are able to learn more about issues such as quality of life, medication use, and challenges that youth with illness experience daily. 

• See videos from VIA - Asthma participants
• See videos from VIA - Overweight participants
• See videos from VIA - Transitions participants

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.”

Video Cameras Provide A Glimpse at Health

think MTV and the Kaiser Family Foundation have announced an initiative to mark the 25th anniversary of the first AIDS case documented by the Centers for Disease Control.  They will provide video cameras to young people in order to create "a documentary in which young people themselves tell the story of how their generation has been impacted by the virus."

Congrats to both organizations for a positive use of media and technology to provide insight into an important health issue. 

This video project is similar to the work we do with Video Intervention/Prevention Assessment (VIA).  Adolescents who live with chronic illness document their experiences on videotape, which then goes through a process of qualitative analysis to find trends and commonalities among the participants.  The young people who take part in this project are courageous individuals who give us a window into their lives so that we may understand the illness experience better.  The VIA website has over 20 video clips available to see.