Media influence varies accoring to ethnicity

An article in theMarch issue of Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine indicates that white teenagers are more likely than black adolescents to start smoking after high exposure to R-rated movies and minimal restrictions on television viewing.

I wonder how the effects of youtube and myspace also affect the issue as well.

Researchers suggest that since the majority of actors are white, the behavioral impact does not transport to black adolescents because they do not identify with the characters.

Past research has suggested that all U.S. adolescents, regardless of race, have a higher risk of initiating smoking as their exposure to smoking in the media increases. In 2002, smoking was portrayed in 90 percent of PG- and PG-13–rated movies, and in 100 percent of R-rated movies, according to background information provided by the authors.

The article goes on to say that about 20 percent of episodes of popular, non-educational prime-time television programs depict tobacco use, and pro-smoking portrayals outnumber anti-smoking portrayals by a ratio of 10 to 1.

Christine Jackson, Ph.D., from Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation, Chapel Hill, N.C., and colleagues interviewed 735 12- to 14-year-old adolescents from 14 public middle schools in the southeastern United States.

About equal proportions of the students were black and white, male and female, and none smoked at the beginning of the study. In the fall of 2001, the students were asked which of 93 popular films shown in theaters from 2001 to 2002 they had seen, how often they watched television, and whether their parents had rules about the types of television shows they watched.

At a follow-up interview in 2004, they were asked about their smoking behavior.
White adolescents with high exposure to R-rated movies were nearly seven times more likely to start smoking compared with those who had low exposure. Even after adjusting for other risk factors such as having a friend who smokes, lack of parental involvement and poor academic performance, those who watched more R-rated movies were still three times more likely to start smoking. White adolescents who had access to unsupervised television viewing were also more likely to start smoking.

However, in black adolescents, there was no association between risky media-watching habits and smoking initiation; those with higher exposure to R-rated movies and a private television were just as likely to start smoking as those with lower exposure.

The reasons for an association between media exposure to smoking and smoking behavior present in white adolescents but not black adolescents are not known. The researchers suggest the “transportation theory” as one possible explanation.

This theory speculates that the impact of a media type on an audience depends on that audience’s involvement in that media type. It has been shown that black adolescents identify better with black rather than white characters in the media. The researchers note that it may be the case that television and movies, in which the majority of actors are white, are less influential on their smoking behavior compared to white adolescents.

Two articles on the effectiveness of Head Start and universal Pre-K programs

The APA, on their website issues press releases, which are summaries of important research articles. This is pretty interesting - and has to do with Head Start. I think that as urban school psychologists, we will probably need to look at this issue carefully.

The other great thing that APA does is that when issuing a press release, it always links to the research articles that it discusses. So I've included the links to the articles below.




WASHINGTON – In two studies appearing in a special issue of Developmental Psychology, researchers show the benefits of universal pre-K programs (serving 4-year-olds) and Early Head Start programs (serving infants, toddlers, and their families) on children's cognitive and language development, but especially for those children who are from low-income families. The study of pre-K documented benefits in several aspects of school readiness, and the Early Head Start study showed gains in social-emotional development and benefits for parents as well. Developmental Psychology is published by the American Psychological Association (APA).

Findings from both studies confirm the positive effects of these programs for children from birth to age five, including higher performance in children's cognitive and language functioning. The Early Head Start program benefited children's social and emotional development and health as well as reduced aggressive behavior, and improved parent-child relations, and the pre-K program increased parents' involvement in school and home activities.

In the study authored by public policy professor William T. Gormley, Jr., Ph.D., and his colleagues of Georgetown University, 1,567 pre-K 4-year-old children and 1,461 children who just completed one of the pre-K programs in Tulsa, Oklahoma, were compared on letter-word identification, spelling and applied problems. Statistical controls for demographic characteristics equalized the two groups. Those children who participated in the state-funded universal pre-K program did better on cognitive tests that measured pre-reading and reading skills, prewriting and spelling skills and math reasoning and problem-solving skills than those children who did not participate in the pre-K program.

The pre-K program improved performances for children from different ethnic backgrounds (Hispanic, Black, White and Native American) and income brackets (measured by those who are eligible for a full price lunch, a reduced-price lunch and no lunch subsidy), according to the study. Disadvantaged children and Hispanic children benefited the most.

This study, says lead author Gormley, is an improvement over past studies on effectiveness of school readiness programs because it uses more scientifically sound methods. "We use a methodological design that reduces the likelihood of biasing our selection of children and we use standardized measurements that are administered to the children only by college-educated and specially trained teachers."

The Georgetown team concluded that universal pre-K programs run by the public schools can prepare children from varied backgrounds to learn the foundations of reading, writing and problem solving and be better able to master these skills in later grades.

The second study examined the benefits of Early Head Start programs for young children and their families using a rigorous experimental design. These programs were originally developed in the mid-1990s as an expansion of the federally funded Head Start program to enhance children's development while strengthening low-income families.

This study conducted by a team of researchers at Mathematica Policy Research in Princeton and Columbia University examined 3,001 families who applied to 17 Early Head Start programs located in rural and urban areas across the United States. The families were randomly assigned to enroll in the program or to serve as the control group. Families were eligible to participate in this program if their incomes were at or below the federal poverty level and were expecting a child or had a child under a year old. Ten percent of the families participating could be above the poverty level.

The children were assessed on measures of cognitive, language, social and emotional development and health (overall status and immunization rates) at 14 months, 24 months and then at 36 months. Parents of the children who participated in the program were compared to parents whose children did not participate in the Early Head Start program on how they related to their children, specifically, how supportive or detached they were when interacting with their child, how supportive the home environment was for children's cognitive and language development, whether parents read to their child daily and how often they spanked their child.

Each Early Head Start program provided either home- or center-based services or a combination of both. Programs that met the federal Head Start program performance standards produced the best results. By directly assessing the children and observing them interacting with their parents, the authors found that the children in the programs performed better on cognitive and language development measures than the children in the control group. These children scored lower on an aggressive behavior problems scale and showed higher levels of attention in a play situation while being better able to engage their parents during parent-child interactions.

From interviews with primary caregivers and parents and through observation of parents interacting with their children, the researchers found that the parents who did participate in Early Head Start were more emotionally supportive, provided more language and learning opportunities at home, read to their children more and spanked their children less than did control group parents. The programs that offered a mix of home visiting and center-based services and had fully implemented the performance standards early achieved the best results with the children and the parents.

From these results, said project director John Love, "we can conclude that Early Head Start can influence multiple aspects of development-- cognitive, language, and social-emotional-- in very young children from poverty-level families. And this happens one or two years before the children typically begin pre-kindergarten programs. Early Head Start participation can also improve overall family life as indicated by the enhanced supportiveness parents demonstrated-aspects of parenting that have the potential to continue supporting children's development after they leave the program." Dr. Love also noted that other research has shown the value of larger vocabularies, reduced behavior problems, and enriched home environments for children being successful when they get to school.

Article: "The Effects of Universal Pre-K on Cognitive Development," William T. Gormley, Jr., Ph.D., Ted Gayer, Ph.D., Deborah Phillips, Ph.D., and Brittany Dawson, M.A., Georgetown University; Developmental Psychology, Vol. 41, No. 6. http://www.apa.org/journals/releases/dev416872.pdf

Article: "The Effectiveness of Early Head Start for 3-Year-Old Children and Their Parents: Lessons for Policy and Programs," John M. Love, Ph.D., Ellen Eliason Kisker, Ph.D., Christine Ross, Ph.D., Jill Constantine, Ph.D., Kimberly Boller, Ph.D., Louisa Banks Tarullo, Ed.D., Peter Z. Schochet, Ph.D., Diane Paulsell, M.P.A., and Cheri Vogel, Ph.D., Mathematica Policy Research, Inc.; Helen Raikes, Ph.D., University of Nebraska-Lincoln; Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, Ph.D., and Christy Brady-Smith, Ph.D., Columbia University; Rachel Chazan-Cohen, Ph.D., U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; and Allison Sidle Fuligni, Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles; Developmental Psychology, Vol. 41, No. 6. http://www.apa.org/journals/releases/dev416885.pdf