Children`s comprehension televised social content

Abstract

V ABSTRACT In the present study, children's comprehension of social content conveyed by television programs was investigated. One of the major concerns was to compare children's (n=50) comprehension according to their social background. Children, 4.5 to 6 years of age, were shown segments of the program, Sesame Street that have messages related to cooperative behavior and autonomous behavior. Their comprehension was assessed by asking them (a) to explain what they had seen, and (b) to state the moral of the story. Thus the data base was consisted of children's factual explanations of the stories and the inferences they made from them. These two types of information were evaluated seperately. The former one was analysed quantitevely by giving each subject a comprehension score; the latter one was analysed qualitatively since the number of inferences the subjects could make were very few. Thus, children from low and high socio-economic strata were compared in terms of their comprehension of the factual information in the stories and their ability to relate what happened in the story to broader, more general values. The analyse yielded the following findings: High SES children gained a higher comprehension score than low SES children. When seperate analyses were conducted for each film segment, it was found that differences reached significance for only two segments. That means the overall difference between the comprehension scores of children from high and low SES was derived mainly from the differences on these two segments. TheV! reasons for this finding was investigated by analysing the structure of the stories. It was found that the segment, `Butterflies` had a considerably more complex structure and the segment, `Edi and Büdü` had an element of humor that shadowed the concept of cooperation in the segment. Thus, the better performance of high SES subjects came forward especially on these two segments. The comparison of the children from the two social groups with respect to their ability to draw inferences from stories revealed that high SES children provided a moral for more segments compared to low SES children. Though very few children from either social class were able to infer the moral of the story, high SES subjects abstracted messages from more segments and seemed to have a better developed ability to make an abstraction from a specific situation and express it verbally as compared to low SES children. Further analyses of the inferences revealed that almost twice as many inferences were made from the cooperation stories as compared to the autonomy stories. This finding was discussed within the theoretical framework of individualism and collectivism.