Media Effects Research

Liz Perle - Editor-in-Chief, Common Sense Media

Media is 24/7 at this point and you've gotta study it.

Richard Campbell - Author, Media and Culture

The sort of dominant way that we've studied media over the years is through media effects. What is the effect of a particular medium on people that use it, on people that experience it?

Liz Perle

Media research has come a long way in the last 20 years because I think universities have finally, and doctors have finally, realized the impact that media is having on the kids. 

Richard Campbell

We know, for instance, because we have thousands and thousands of these studies, is there's some connection between children who watch a lot of violent movies and play violent video games, that they tend to be aggressive, that there's some connection to behaving sort of more aggressively. We're not sure what causes what, but we know there's a correlation between spending a lot of time with violent media and being aggressive in your own life.

Liz Perle

Let's just take one area: obesity.  Obesity has quadrupled in our kids in this country in the last 20 years.  You know what else has quadrupled?  The number of ads that these kids see.  ninety eight percent of programming for kids ages two to eleven contains something that has sugar, salt, or fat.  A kid on a Saturday morning sees a commercial for junk food every other commercial they see.  Kids at the age of 2 can recognize branding.  So media research got behind these kind of phenomenon and really quantified their impact, and it's been critical.  It's been critical not just in the obesity world, but in the body image world, in the substance abuse world.  Media research that has been done at UCSF is just really shown the impact of smoking in TV and movies on kids, that one out of three kids who starts smoking does so because they see smoking by their heroes in movies.

Richard Campbell

Now, partly the reason this kind of media research developed was communication departments, media departments, anybody who was sort of studying these, because this was a new field, the idea was it's got to be scientific. You have to look like you're doing science.

Jeff Goodby - Goodby, Silverstein & Partners

If anything, the research has gotten weirder and more arcane and allegedly scientific, kind of alchemical. 

Terry Curtis - Communication Design, California State University, Chico

The advertisers, not the advertising agencies but the people who are paying the bills for the advertising, began to be skeptical about the value of the money they were paying for all this research because they still couldn't really be sure that a dollar's advertising bought them more than a dollar's worth of revenue, much less profit.

Jeff Goodby

There are things now where they attach electrodes to people's heads and measure the parts of the brain that are reacting to things.  And so, the kind of thing that Vance Packard and The Hidden Persuaders said he was afraid of.  I mean, they're doing it now. 

Terry Curtis

The people who were doing the research, the advertising agencies and the marketing firms, very much believed that they were finding out real truth, they were finding out real information.  But the link between that real information and the design of the media, the design of the content of the media, was still a very fuzzy one. 

Jeff Goodby

There are a number of different ways of doing tracking surveys.  You can do mall intercept kind of random things.  You can give people questionnaires and have them fill them out.  You can do Nielsen box kind of traditional who's watching the TV and what's going on and what are they watching.  TiVo has a thing where they actually measure -- because people are always fast forwarding through the commercials on TiVo -- so they've actually come up with an ingenious way of measuring which commercials people stop on when they're fast forwarding and go back and watch. 

Terry Curtis

Now what we're getting is, with Google, the ability to go into a household.  We know which household has which demographic in it, and conceivably even what programming they watch, what they have bought before, what their consumption patterns were in the past.  And by developing an enormous amount of data on each of those groups down to very, very small, fine segments.

Liz Perle

That said, media research is really lacking in the online world.  We are conducting the largest experiment in history on our children  with no research.  We don't know the effect of avatars on identity.  We don't know the effect of Facebook friends versus 3D friends.  We don't know so much about what is the bread and milk of our children's existence.  There was some funding from government, the Camera Bill a few years ago, that is starting to fund media research, but it's really in the province right now of the universities and institutions.  We have to figure out the impact of this new participatory, digital world on our kids.