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dissertation entitled

DO CHILDREN FOLLOW THEIR PARENTS’ GUIDELINES
FOR TELEVISION USE?

presented by

SARAH FRANCES ROSAEN

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2/05 p:/CIRC/DaIeDue.indd-p.1

DO CHILDREN FOLLOW THEIR PARENTS’ GUIDELINES
FOR TELEVISION USE?

By

Sarah Frances Rosaen

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulﬁllment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Department of Communication

2006

ABSTRACT

DO CHILDREN FOLLOW THEIR PARENTS’ GUIDELINES
FOR TELEVISION USE?

By

Sarah Frances Rosaen

A sample of 102 child (7 to 12 years old) and parent pairs were surveyed about whether
children comply with parental mediation guidelines. The study found that children
comply to restrictive mediation the most, followed by active mediation and ﬁnally co-
viewing. This investigation considered both goodness of ﬁt on temperament and
parenting style as important determinants of this compliance. It was anticipated that as
goodness of ﬁt on temperament increased compliance to parental mediation would
increase, but this hypothesis was not supported. Parenting styles did have an effect on
compliance. Overall, permissive and authoritarian parenting styles were negatively
correlated to compliance with these guidelines, while authoritative parenting was
positively correlated with compliance. Additional ﬁndings are reported about the
discrepancy between parent and child reports and the relative inﬂuence of parenting

styles and mediation guidelines on compliance.

Copyﬁght by
SARAH FRANCES ROSAEN
2006

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This dissertation could not have been completed without the assistance of the teachers,
parents, and children in the East Lansing and Holt school districts. Their interest and help
was needed and appreciated. Moreover, I must recognize John Sherry, my dissertation

adviser, for his care and knowledge in guiding me through this project.

iv

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF TABLES ................................................................................... vi
LIST OF FIGURES ................................................................................. vii
INTRODUCTION ......... 1
LITERATURE REVIEW ........................................................................... 3
METHOD ............................................................................................ 30
RESULTS ............................................................................................ 48
DISCUSSION ....................................................................................... 63
REFERENCES ...................................................................................... 84
APPENDIX A ........................................................................................ 94
APPENDIX B ...................................................................................... 103
FOOTNOTES ...................................................................................... 114
v

LIST OF TABLES

TABLE 1 ............................................................................................ 115
TABLE 2 ............................................................................................ 116
TABLE 3 ............................................................................................ 117
TABLE 4 ............................................................................................ 118
TABLE 5 ............................................................................................ 119
TABLE 6 ............................................................................................ 120
TABLE 7 ............................................................................................ 121
TABLE 8 ............................................................................................ 122
TABLE 9 ............................................................................................ 123

vi

LIST OF FIGURES

FIGURE 1 ............................................................................................ 27

vii

INTRODUCTION

* For the past 30 years, scholars within the television parental mediation arena have
been trying to deﬁne television mediation and to discover what predicts different types of
mediation. The conceptualization and measurement of mediation has been reﬁned and
three common types of mediation have been identiﬁed: co-viewing, active mediation, and
restrictive mediation. Generally, the research suggests that active and restrictive
mediation styles lead to more positive outcomes than co-vievving strategies (Cantor,
2002; Corder-Bolz, 1980; Dorr, Kovaric, & Doubleday, 1989; McLeod, Atkin, &
Chaffee, 19728; 1972b; Messaris & Kerr, 1984; Nathanson, 1999; Nathanson, 2001b;
Nathanson & Cantor, 2000; Rothschild & Morgan, 1987; Singer & Singer, 1998). The
choice of mediation strategy is typically related to parents’ views (positive or negative)
about the effects that television is likely to have on their children. Generally, negative
views are associated with restrictive mediation, positive views are associated with co-
viewing, and both negative and positive views are associated with active mediation (Dorr
et al., 1989; Nathanson, 2001b; St. Peters, Fitch, Huston, Wright, & Eakins, 1991; van der
Voort, Nikken, & van Lil, 1992; Yang & Nathanson, 2005,). Although these ﬁndings are
helpful and suggest that some mediation strategies result in better outcomes than others,
there has not been research on whether children actually comply with the mediation
strategies their parents use. The goal of this study is to understand whether children do
comply with these guidelines and to look at factors that inﬂuence child compliance with

parental guidelines for television use.

Several psychological investigations have found that children with a similar
behavioral disposition to their parents are more likely to comply with their behavioral
requests and to exhibit more adaptive behavior than those who have a different
disposition from their parents (i.e., Paterson & Sanson, 1999; Talwar, Nitz, & Lerner,
1990). Additionally, parenting style may also have an effect on this relationship.
Psychology studies have found that parents who encourage more autonomy and do not
exert a lot of control over their children obtain the most compliance from their children
(i.e., Braungart-Rieker, Garwood, & Stifter, 1997; Rubin, Burgess, & Hastings, 2002).
This study will investigate compliance with parental mediation to see whether the same

pattern of effects occur in research on television mediation.

LITERATURE REVIEW

Media Exposure

One speciﬁc group of children that media research focuses on are children in
middle childhood. Middle childhood is deﬁned approximately as the ages between 7 and
12 years old in the psychological literature (Erikson, 1968). According to Erikson (1968),
middle childhood is a time when children transition from only being inﬂuenced by their
household to being shaped by their household and other outside inﬂuences, such as peers,
school, and the other factors in the world, such as television. This study focuses on the
television uses of children in middle childhood for three reasons.

First, research on media exposure suggests that this group watches more
television than children in different age groups. A 2005 survey of 2,032 children between
8 and 18 years old found that more than 80% of this age group watches television daily;
on average they watch in excess of 3 hours every day (Roberts, Foehr, & Rideout, 2005).
This exposure stays consistent between 8 and 14 years of age and then drops below 3
hours in the high school years (Roberts et al., 2005). Second, mass media researchers
suggest that this is a critical age range for television consumption because children
typically develop the ability between 7 and 10 years of age to recognize fantasy from
reality (Cantor, 1998). Findings such as these have resulted in the American Academy of
Pediatrics recommending that children older than two years of age are not exposed to
more than one or two hours of television per day (2006). A report that surveyed parents

of 1,065 children between the ages of 0 and 6 years old, did ﬁnd that this age group

averages only an hour with television daily (Rideout, Vandewater, & Wartella, 2003).
Finally, because this age group developmentally is just starting to integrate outside
inﬂuences into their decision making processes, they are especially vulnerable to the
inﬂuences of television.
Environmental Factors

The home environment is a very important factor when researching children in
middle childhood. These children are evolving from being solely dependent on the
parent, to allowing other sources of information to inﬂuence their decisions. One source
of inﬂuence is television. Parents tend to have the most inﬂuence over the way the
television affects their child by setting guidelines for that use. Studies on parental
inﬂuence have considered parent and family characteristics in the discussion of how well
certain guidelines for television work in the home. For example, family types,
communication styles and parental involvement factors have been a popular focus in
these studies (i.e., BuerkeI-Rothfuss & Buekel, 2001; Warren, Gerke, & Kelly, 2002;
Warren, 2003, 2005). In fact, in 1972 the Surgeon General’s Advisory Committee on
Television and Social Behavior reported a need for research that considers the home
environment as an important variable in how children are affected by television content.

Therefore, child development and family are important factors to consider in
television research. Models of ecological development speciﬁcally focus on the
interrelationships among such variables. Bronfenbrenner (1979) advanced one of the
most popular ecological models. His model, in particular, recommends evaluating the
communicative processes or interactions between these variables, rather than looking at

the correlation between one environmental effect and another. There is a focus on a

network of variables and their effect on different processes. This paper uses this model as
a framework for understanding why parental inﬂuences are important to consider when
investigating television in society.
Media Theory and Negative Media Effects

Researchers and parents are concerned about children’s television exposure
because heavier television exposure (more hours) and exposure to certain content have
been associated with negative effects in the investigation of several media theories.
According to cultivation theory, individuals from environments where television provides
the main exposure to culture tend to reiterate, conﬁrm and nourish the values and
perspectives they are exposed to by television (Gerbner, Gross, Morgan, Signorielli, &
Shanahan, 2002, p. 49). One of the main environmental aspects of television is violence.
Content analyses of television conﬁrm again and again that television presents a very
violent environment, perhaps creating the perception that the world is a “mean” place
(Signorielli, 1990). Exposure to this “mean” environment can be very scary, especially
for children. Cantor and her colleagues have shown in several investigations that children
are sometimes fearful of the images they view on television (2002). Psychological
practice suggests that one can reduce their fear of something by exposing themselves to
that item over and over again; this procedure results in desensitization. Studies have
conﬁrmed that because many children view a lot of television and the television
environment is so violent, over time children become desensitized to the potency of the
violence they are viewing (Wilson, 1987).

Theory also suggests that since children become desensitized to the images they

view on television, over time they can incur negative behavioral effects from viewing this

material. According to social learning theory, since heavy viewers are more likely to
value the same things that television promotes, they will also be more likely to model
behavior that television suggests is valued and rewarded (Bandura, 2002). For example,
many studies have shown that, after exposure to violent media, children model those
images through aggressive behavior (Liebert & Schwarzberg, 1977). Similarly, television
can have a short-term effect where the viewer is primed to think about related
information in their own memory. Studies also suggest that aggressive television content
can prime an individual to behave harshly in real life situations (Bryant & Thompson,
2002)

In general these theories suggest that watching television for many hours and
watching certain kinds of content can result in several negative consequences. Clearly
parents need to be informed of how to effectively protect their children ﬁom the negative
effects of television. Many parents may jump to the conclusion that the only solution is to
take the television away. Although a reduction in viewing hours is associated with better
outcomes, this in combination with lessons of how to critically watch television can result
in better protection from these negative effects. For these reasons, this paper focuses on
parental guidelines associated with problematic television content in order to give parents
more information so they can effectively protect their children.

Parental Mediation

Parents do seem to be concerned about the negative effects of television on their
children because many of them have guidelines for their children to follow for television
use. Rideout et al., (2005) found that more children in middle childhood have rules than

in other age groups: 55% of children between 8 and 10 years of age have rules in the

home, 51% between 11 and 14 years old, and 31% for children between 15 and 18 years
old. In addition, having some guidelines does have an effect on exposure levels for
children in middle childhood. A report on children between the ages of 8 and 18 years old
found that parents who have low enforcement of guidelines for television have children
that watch television less often (2.4 hours per day) than children with no guidelines (3.2
hours per day) (Roberts etal., 2005).

Although the above study is informative and suggests that restrictions do exist,
other questions are important like what other guidelines parents have for their children’s
television consumption, whether children follow these guidelines, and what effect the
guidelines have in reducing negative effects from exposure to television. Research on the
guidelines that parents have regarding their children’s television use began about 30 years
ago. Guidelines associated with television consumption have been labeled parental
mediation and deﬁned as “interactions with children about television... [which
can]. . .take place before, during, or after viewing” (Nathanson, 2001,, p. 116). The
research landscape for parental mediation to date has investigated how often parents
mediate their child’s television use, what methods they use, and if their methods work.
This research has conceptualized mediation into three dimensions: restrictive mediation,
active mediation and co-viewing, which contain passive and intentional co-viewing
dimensions.

The ﬁrst type of mediation most parents are familiar with is restrictive mediation.
This includes basic guidelines about the amount of time a child can spend in front of the
television, when they can watch television, the type of content the child is allowed to

view, and if viewing is used as a reward or punishment (Nathanson, 2001,).

The next type is active mediation, which speciﬁcally refers to the conversation
parents (or the television rule maker) and children participate in about television. This not
only includes active participation in children’s viewing by parents to induce critical
viewing, but also active viewing by children, which results in them asking their parents
about information they see on television. Nathanson (2001 )a listed the most common
forms of television talk, including “discussing the reality status of programs, making
critical comments about behaviors witnessed on television, and providing supplemental
information about t0pics introduced by television” (p. 120).

Finally co-viewing has recently been re-conceptualized to include two
dimensions, passive and intentional co-viewing. Passive co-viewing is the simple act of
the parent watching television with their child, with little thought about the child. This is
usually associated with a more “parent-oriented” purpose where the parents view for their
own interest (Yang & Nathanson, 2005,). Intentional co-viewing includes an active
concern for how the media affects children, and is employed with a “child-oriented
purpose” (with the beneﬁt of the child in mind) (Yang & Nathanson, 2005.).

Over the last 30 years many studies have been conducted that have tested these
mediation styles for how often parents use them and how effective they are in mitigating
negative media effects. In general, four different areas of ﬁndings have emerged:
variation in mediation by age, variation by content, variation in parents’ views of
television (positive or negative), and ﬁnally what mediation strategies are the most
effective. First, young children seem to receive stricter mediation more often than older
children (Atkin, Greenberg, & Baldwin, 1991; St. Peters et al., 1991; Warren, 2003). For

example, Valkenburg, Krcmar, Peeters, and Marseille (1999) surveyed a random sample

of 519 Dutch parents with children between 5 and 12 years old and found that passive co-
viewing was the most popular, followed by restrictive mediation and then active
mediation, but with active mediation being speciﬁcally more common for younger
children. More recently, intentional co-viewing, which has been positively linked to
active mediation, was also found to be more common with younger children (Yang &
Nathanson, 2005b). By contrast, older children receive more passive co-viewing from
parents because they tend to enjoy similar programs (Bybee, Robinson, & Turow, 1982;
Dorr et al., 1989; St. Peters et al., 1991).

However, Yang and Nathanson (2005,) found that passive co-viewing did not
differ by age in a study of 398 parents of children from kindergarten to sixth grade. This
inconsistency may be in part due to the reconceptualization of co-viewing: perhaps the
original surveys about passive co-viewing differed because some parents were really
referring to their intentional co-viewing patterns. It could also be that some programs are
of interest to both younger and older age groups. According to the 2002-2003 Nielson
ratings there was considerable overlap of programs popular for children (ages 2 to 11)
and tweens (ages 9 to 14). For example, programs like Spongebob Squarepants, Jimmy
Neutron, and Fairly Odd Parents were included in the top 20 rated programs for both age
groups. Studies might account for these similarities by ensuring that their samples include
larger developmental differences (Piaget, 2000). This ﬁnding may also be a function of
the child's birth order: perhaps children with older siblings are more likely to watch what
their siblings are interested in rather than what is typically viewed by children of their
age. In fact, some of the literature on mediation suggests that co-viewing occurs with

siblings more than with parents (N athanson, 2001 8). Finally, it is important to note that

the Valkenburg et al. (1999) study was conducted in Germany, while other investigations
have concentrated in the USA. Therefore, cultural differences could also account for
some of these discrepancies.

Second, content is extremely important when investigating mediation style. One
strategy that parents take is encouraging the use of “safe” stations. For example, St.
Peters et a1. (1991) found that some parents encouraged the viewing of PBS
programming. Content is typically divided into two categories: educational and
entertainment. With educational content parents may use a combination of mediation
strategies, but entertainment content is more likely to involve restrictive and active
mediation strategies in order to minimize negative outcomes. Speciﬁcally, Valkenburg et
a1. (1999) found that restrictive mediation was more common for parents who were
concerned with aggressive content or fright reactions on television while active mediation
was more common when only concerned about fright. Nathanson, Eveland, Park, and
Paul (2002) interviewed 265 caregivers of children in second through eighth grades and
found that active mediation occurred more often with violent content than sexual content.
Unfortunately, she also found a third person effect where parents believe other children
are more likely than their own to be affected by violent content. Yang and Nathanson
(2005,.) also found that intentional co-viewing is used more than passive co-viewing for
entertainment programming, while intentional and passive co-viewing are used about the
same amount for educational content. In general, these ﬁndings do suggest a consistent
use of more critical strategies for harmful content and a collage of strategies for

educational content that is not interpreted as harmful. Moreover, researchers urge

10

investigators to distinguish harmful and helpful content when asking about mediation
strategies (Yang & Nathanson, 2005b).

The third major ﬁnding from past studies is that parents who perceive the
television as having negative effects use more mediation in general (speciﬁcally more
restrictive and active mediation styles) while parents who see the television as a positive
source use co-viewing more often (Dorr et al., 1989; St. Peters et al., 1991). One of the
strongest examples of this effect was revealed in Nathanson (2001,) who surveyed 394
parents and children between second and sixth grades and found that parents with
negative views about television used both restrictive and active mediation styles while
parents with positive views used only co-viewing. However, the strategies parents chose
did not always accurately communicate their views about television: restrictive mediation
effectively signaled to the child that parents saw this material as negative, but both active
mediation (which is used by parents with negative views about television) and co-
viewing signaled an endorsement of the material by-the parent.

Consistent with this effect, Yang and Nathanson (2005,) found that passive co-
viewing was predicted by positive attitudes to entertainment content. Yet intentional co-
viewing, which is associated with active mediation, was not predicted by content or
views about television. Similarly, van der Voort et al. (1992), in a study with a random
sample of Dutch parents drawn from a large representative database of 10,000 with
children between 3 and 18 years of age, found that parents with more negative views
about television did use more restrictive mediation styles but also that active mediation
was associated with both positive and negative views about television. The van der Voort

et a1. (1992) investigation did not collect data on the content of the programs on which

11

parents were making their judgments. Therefore, the use of active mediation by parents
who had both positive and negative views could be the result of the content of the
material to which they referred when making their judgments.

The fourth major area of research on mediation styles investigates the
effectiveness of each mediation style. Generally researchers view stricter mediation styles
(like restrictive and active mediation, and now, potentially, intentional co-viewing) as
successful in reducing effects from negative content, while passive co-viewing is
associated with poorer outcomes.

The only mediation style that results fairly consistently in positive outcomes is
active mediation. In investigations of learning educational content, learning pro-social
behaviors, reducing fright reactions, and reducing imitations of aggressive behavior from
violent television (Austin, Roberts, & Nass, 1990; Cantor, 2002; Corder-Bolz, 1980;
Nathanson & Cantor, 2000; Nathanson, 1999; Nathanson, Wilson, McGee, & Sebastian,
2002; Singer, Singer, Desmond, Hirsch, & Nicol, 1988; Singer & Singer, 1998), active
mediation does seem generally to work in reducing the negative effects and increasing
the positive effects from media images. However, researchers do suggest that parents pay
attention to the valence of the message they give to their children. A negative valence is
best with negative content, or negative active mediation, in order to encourage the child
to devalue the content, whereas educational and pro-social learning messages should have
a positive valence to encourage the child to positively value the content (N athanson,
2001),. Nathanson (1999) established support for the success of active mediation in a
study of 394 parents and children in second through sixth grades, ﬁnding that active and

restrictive mediation were negatively related to aggressive outcomes from watching

12

violent television while co-viewing was positively related to aggression. This study
suggests that active and restrictive mediation styles seem to socialize children into
granting less time and attention to violent television, which then inﬂuences the
subsequent frequency of aggressive outcomes.

However, in the same study, Nathanson (1999) found a small, signiﬁcant,
curvilinear relationship between restrictive mediation and aggressive outcomes. This
suggests that more extreme restrictive guidelines may have the opposite effect and create
more aggressive outcomes, consistent with the forbidden fruit hypothesis. Other
investigations have also found inconsistent results for the use of restrictive mediation.
McLeod et a1. (1972,) found a small effect for restrictive mediation and, in another
analysis, it was found to be non-signiﬁcant (1972b). These weak results for the
effectiveness of restrictive mediation suggest that another variable may be at work.
Perhaps with some children rule restrictions can work, but with others different strategies
need to be employed.

Similarly, co-viewing is sometimes associated with positive and negative effects.
Generally, the presence of the parent suggests approval of the material, so for educational
and pro-social content this mediation strategy works because children interpret their
parents’ approval and are more likely to adopt the behavior (Salomon, 1977). However,
the same logic suggests that negative material would also be viewed as approved by their
parents and could lead to adoption of those behaviors. For example, a few studies have
found that children have difficulty recognizing television realism when parents co-view
(Dorr et al., 1989; Messaris & Kerr, 1984). Children also have more stereotyped views of

sex roles (Rothschild & Morgan, 1987) and increased aggressive behavior after viewing

13

violent television when parents use co-viewing as a mediation strategy (N athanson,
1999). This assumption of parental approval was addressed directly in Nathanson
(2001,), where children who believed their parents approved of television depictions had
a positive orientation toward that material, which in turn makes them more likely to
imitate that behavior.

Research on this mediation strategy has also generated inconsistent ﬁndings. As
with restrictive mediation, this suggests that another variable may be at work. Some of
these inconsistencies can be explained by the new conceptualization of co-viewing. Yang
and Nathanson (2005,) suggest that intentional co-viewing is associated with more
discussion of television content, while passive co—viewing is negatively related to more
effective strategies like restrictive mediation.

Another reason that could explain not only the inconsistencies for co-viewing but
also restrictive mediation is that some investigations have indicated that parents and
children give inconsistent reports about mediation (Fujioka & Austin, 2003; Greenberg,
Ericson, & Vlahos, 1971; Rossiter & Robertson, 1975). For example, Greenberg et a].
(1972) interviewed 85 mother and child pairs (fourth and ﬁfth graders) and found that
they disagreed in no consistent pattern on most questions about the child’s television
viewing. More recently, Fujioka and Austin (2003) found differences in parent and child
reports as well. They interviewed 273 children in third, sixth and ninth grades and their
parents and found that children reported more positive mediation by parents than parents
reported. They did ﬁnd that reports of negative mediation were about the same. These
results suggest that investigations need to be careful about their methodology in order to

ﬁgure out what behavior is actually occurring in the home.

14

Finally, an additional reason that could also explain these inconsistencies is that
some children may not comply with their parent’s guidelines for television, which, to
date, has not been investigated as a variable in mediation research. If compliance varies
in children, then certain mediation strategies could result in mixed outcomes. One
variable that has been found to be important in obtaining compliance is the similarity in
personality between a parent and their child. This has typically been studied by
investigating the goodness of ﬁt between a parent and child on temperament or behavioral
disposition characteristics.

Temperament

A common deﬁnition of temperament is advanced by Bates (1989), which states
that temperament “. . .consists of biologically rooted individual differences in behavior
tendencies that are present early in life and are relatively stable across various kinds of
situations and over the course of time” (p. 4). Strelau (1998) details four characteristics
important in deﬁning temperament: behavior characteristics that differ across individuals,
that are relatively stable, that have a biological basis, and are formal characteristics, such
as intensity, speed, and mobility (p. 35). In general, behavioral temperament is a frequent
focus of research on children (Strelau, 1998, p. 31).

One of the most popular deﬁnitions of behavior-based temperament was
developed by Thomas and Chess (1977), which describes temperament as “a general term
referring to the how of behavior. It differs from ability, which is concerned with the what
and how well of behaving, and from motivation, which accounts for why a person does
what he is doing. Temperament, by contrast, concerns the way in which an individual

behaves.” (Thomas & Chess, 1977, p. 9). Their conceptualization comes from an

15

ecological perspective because it strongly emphasizes the social environments interaction
with individual differences in human development from early childhood. Their
explication of this concept has been impressively tested in a longitudinal study called the
New York Longitudinal Study (NYLS; Thomas & Chess, 1977). The researchers were
able to retain 133 individuals that they followed from infancy to adulthood from middle
and upper class neighborhoods in New York. The study included observations and
interviews collected at important developmental ages for the children including infancy,
early childhood, childhood, adolescence and adulthood. In the early stages of the study
the researchers extracted nine temperament traits from reports of the children’s parents.
These traits have been extensively tested and have remained virtually unchanged since
their original conceptualization. ’

The traits include Activity level (the proportion of active to inactive period in a
child’s motor behavior), Rhythmicity (regularity) (regularity of biological functions),
Approach or withdrawal (positive or negative response to the initial contact with a new
stimulus), Adaptability (ease of behavior change in a desired direction after initial
response to a new stimulus), Threshold of responsiveness (the intensity of stimulation
needed to induce a noticeable response), Intensity of reaction (the energy level of
response, irrespective of its quality or direction), Quality of mood (the contrast of positive
and negative emotions), Distractibility (the ability of extraneous stimulation to pull .
attention away from ongoing behavior), and Attention span and persistence (the length of
time an activity can be pursed and the ability to continue that activity when distracted)

(Thomas & Chess, 1977).

16

Two studies have speciﬁcally tested temperament as a predictor of media use
(Plomin, Corley, DeFries, & Fulker, 1990; Sherry, 2001). Plomin et a1. (1990) used
genetic determinants of behavior, including intelligence and temperament as predictors of
television viewing. In a sample of 220 adopted children between 3 and 5 years old, with
interviews from both ad0ptive and biological parents, genetic inﬂuence on the hours of
television viewing was not predicted by temperament or intelligence levels. However,
Sherry (2001) suggests that because parents in the Plomin study judged their child’s
television use, the actual viewing behavior may not have been adequately captured.

Sherry (2001) used the paradigm of “uses and gratiﬁcations” (Rosengren, 1974)
to test whether temperament predicts media use motivations. The paradigm suggests that
having a problem usually results in being motivated to solve that problem, which can
result in using the media to try to gratify those needs. Several investigations have studied
motivations for viewing television (Greenberg, 1974; Greenberg & Hnilo, 1996; Rubin,
1985) and have established that speciﬁc motivations for viewing usually fall into one of
two categories, ritualistic, which is typically deﬁned as habitual use, or instrumental use,
which is using the media to seek out speciﬁc information. Sherry (2001) revealed
temperament as a moderately good predictor of media use motivations. A survey of 285
adults suggested that high activity/low rhythmicity led to ritualistic use of the television,
negative mood led to instrumental use, and low task orientation and rigidity led to both
ritualistic and instrumental use of the television.

Generally, the Sherry (2001) study suggests that temperament is related to how an
individual uses television. The present study investigates how similar the parent and child

are on temperament and assumes that if they are similar then both the parent and child

17

should have comparable needs from television. This suggests that parents would be more
likely to understand what mediation guidelines would be appropriate for their child.
Furthermore, children may be more responsive to that course of action because their
parent has appropriately chosen mediation guidelines that ﬁt their television needs, which
in turn could result in greater compliance to those guidelines. This idea of similarity
between the parent and child on temperament is referred to as goodness of ﬁt in the
literature.
Temperament and Goodness of F it

The researchers introduced the concept goodness of ﬁt in order to understand the
interaction of these behavioral traits with social environments (Thomas & Chess, 1977).
This idea explains that normal development can occur when a good ﬁt between the
environment and a child’s disposition exists, whereas a poor ﬁt with the environment can
result in maladaptive ﬁmctioning. This means, for example, that if a child’s typical
behavior patterns are consistent with the way a parent thinks then normal and stress free
development can occur in the household. However, if these behaviors are inconsistent,
this can cause stress in the household and lead to behavior problems in the child.
Important to the understanding of this concept is that the gauge of consistent or
inconsistent behavior is dependent on the culture in which the child lives; maladaptive
behavior in one culture may be adaptive in another.

Past studies have tested this by looking at the similarity or ﬁt between the parent’s
and the child’s reported temperament. The majority of studies on goodness of ﬁt in
relation to child behavior ﬁnd that better ﬁt between parent and child on temperament

results in more adaptive behaviors in the child, and weak ﬁt results in less adaptive

18

behaviors (Gordon, 1981; Nitz, Lerner, Lerner, & Talwar, 1988; Paterson & Sanson,
1999; Talwar et al., 1990). A few studies speciﬁcally address as part of their analysis
conduct problems in children that include reports about how much they follow rules. Two
studies were conducted by the same group of researchers and used the same measures in
each of the analyses. They collected conduct data from both the child’s parent and
teacher. The ﬁrst study was conducted by Nitz, Lerner, Lerner, and Talwar (1988) who
sampled 150 sixth graders and the other was by Talwar et a1. (1990) who followed 75
subjects from the beginning of sixth grade to the end of seventh grade. Both studies found
that a weaker ﬁt between the parent and child results in more reported conduct problems
‘ by the parent speciﬁcally, which include behavioral tendencies like disobeying school
rules, stealing, and lying. Similarly, Paterson and Sanson in 1999 interviewed 74 children
between 5 and 6 years old. This analysis used as its dependent variable a combined
measure of social skills rated by both the child’s parent and teacher, which included
estimates of how much the child followed rules, their conﬁdence levels, estimates of
independence, and self-control. They found that a stronger ﬁt between the parent and
child on temperament decreased the social skills of the child. Given these ﬁndings, the
present study assumes that goodness of ﬁt should result in similar ﬁndings for television,
such that as goodness of ﬁt increases children should be more likely to comply with their
parent’s mediation guidelines.

Another variable that is consistently analyzed, in conjunction with temperament
characteristics, as an important variable that determines compliance are parental
discipline guidelines. These studies more often than not look at what positive or negative

behaviors are associated with different parenting techniques (Brar, 2003; Bates et al.,

19

1998; Braungart-Rieker et al., 1997; Chen, Li, Hou, & Chen, 2003; Harris, 1998; Rubin
etal., 2002; Rubin, Hastings, Chen, Stewart, & McNichol, 1998; Schwebel & Bounds,
2003; Schwebel, Brezausek, Ramey, & Ramey, 2004). This is typically studied by
looking at the parenting style within the home.

Parental Traits and Mediation Strategies

The most popular categories developed for parenting styles are derived from the
interaction of two vectors, parental warmth and parental strictness, resulting in three
dominant styles: Authoritative, Authoritarian, and Permissive (Baurnrind, 1971; 1978;
1991). Authoritative parents are warm but strict, usually expecting their children to do
what they say but they also encourage autonomy. Authoritarian parents expect children to
obey but they are more controlling by being less warm, stricter, and do not encourage
autonomy. Finally, permissive parents are very warm, but lenient. They do not demand
much from their children but they do respond to their child’s needs and desires.

A few studies have looked at parental involvement as predictive of selecting
speciﬁc mediation strategies. Walsch, Lacsniak, and Carlson (1998) surveyed 151
mothers of children in third through sixth grade and found that authoritative parents tend
to rely more on themselves to teach children about what to consume on television,
whereas authoritarian parents rely more on the government or regulation for ideas of how
to decrease their child’s use of the television. Also consistent with these ﬁndings, a study
by F uj ioka and Austin (2002) surveyed 216 parents of children between third and ninth
grade and found that parents with a more open communication style used discussion
based intervention strategies and parents who were more controlling tended to reinforce

television messages. However, Greenberg, Hofshire, Eastin, and Lachlan (2002) in their

20

analysis of 613 married and unmarried mothers, found that mothers high on the
authoritative style reported using restrictive mediation the most instead of the more
common result of active mediation, and this was followed by active mediation and co-
viewing. Similar to this ﬁnding, Abelman (1999, 2001) found that parents who used both
communication —oriented parenting strategies and deprivation discipline were more likely
than not to use television ratings or restrictive mediation guidelines to control their
child’s television use. Finally, Warren et al. (2002) interviewed 32] parents of children 1
to 17 years of age and separated parental engagement into time spent doing domestic and
leisure activities. In this investigation, engagement in leisure activities only predicted
restrictive and active mediation and domestic engagement predicted all three mediation
styles.

Although these studies do not comment on the effects of using these strategies
under different parenting styles, they do suggest that parents who are involved in their
child’s life are more likely to use some type of concrete mediation style. And there is a
tendency for authoritative parents to use mediation tactics found to be more beneﬁcial to
the child. This ﬁnding is consistent with what one would expect given that authoritative
parents guide their children while still encouraging individual thought in a caring manner.
Additionally, one recent study does suggest that active mediation and concept-oriented
communication, which are similar to the authoritative parenting style, are both better at
reducing the negative effects of television advertising than restrictive mediation and
socio-oriented communication, which are similar to the authoritarian parenting style
(Buijzen & Valkenburg, 2005). Moreover, these investigations do not address compliance

with the panents' chosen mediation strategy. For example, if authoritative parents are

21

using more effective strategies, are these parents actually likely to obtain compliance
’from their children from the guidelines they have for television use?

Several psychological studies have tested parenting styles as predictive of
compliance. Compliance in these investigations seems best to ﬁt the deﬁnition advanced
by Epps, Park, Huston, and Ripke (2005), where “compliance is not merely obedience,
but conforming to expectations without constant supervision” (p. 163). Investigations on
this topic have indicated that authoritative parenting results in committed compliance
whereas more authoritarian approaches result in noncompliance or situational
compliance, where the child only complies at speciﬁc times and/or in speciﬁc places
(Brar, 2003; Bates, Petit, Dodge, & Ridge, 1998; Braungart-Rieker et al., 1997; Chen et
al., 2003; Harris, 1998; Rubin et al., 2002; Rubin et al., 1998).. This ﬁnding suggests that
authoritative parenting can result in children following guidelines when the parent is not
present, for example when a child is in another home.

Two sets of ﬁndings are typically reported in these studies; parenting styles that
are associated with positive behavioral and negative behavioral outcomes. Typically,
more involved, caring parents (i.e., parents with an authoritative parenting style) have
been shown to reduce negative or antisocial behaviors from kids with a temperament
style that makes them more prone to poor behavior. Brar (2003), interviewing 160 Indian
immigrant mothers in Canada and their kindergarten or ﬁrst grade children, found that
authoritative parenting was associated with less problem behavior for children who: were
impulsive, had negative emotionality, had a lack of task persistence, and were inhibited.
Similarly, Rubin et a1. (2002), who longitudinally tested the same relationship with 88

mothers and children from toddler age to 4 years old, found that mothers with uninhibited

22

children who used less controlling parenting strategies had children that expressed more
socially intelligent behaviors at age four. Schwebel and his colleagues have also
investigated temperament and parenting and found that children who are exposed to
positive parenting are at a reduced risk for unintentional childhood injury (Schwebel &
Bounds, 2003; Schwebel et al., 2004).

Investigations also show that parents who are less involved or more demanding
than authoritative parents (i.e., authoritarian and permissive parents) strengthen negative
behaviors in children. For example, in a study where 57 toddlers and their mothers were
interviewed, children showed less committed and highly aversive compliance when
parents did not guide their behavior and were more controlling (Braungart-Rieker et al.,
1997). Similarly in the Brar (2003) investigation, authoritarian and permissive parenting
styles were associated positively with problem behavior. And for children in middle
childhood, two studies conducted in the Bates, et a1. (1998) examination found that
children between 7 and 11 years old that had parents who were highly reactive and used
more prohibitions, warnings and scolding to protect them from harm were less likely to
display problem behavior than children from less reactive or more permissive
environments. Given these sets of ﬁndings and the conceptual deﬁnition of the parenting
styles, it seems that as the warmth and strictness of the parent decreases, so does
compliance. Therefore, this study anticipates that the most compliance will be obtained
from more authoritative parents, the least from permissive parents, and authoritarian

parenting will elicit compliance levels somewhere in between the other two.

23

Research Model and Hypotheses

The ﬁrst goal of this research study is to answer a critical question about parental
mediation. A research study has not documented whether children comply with the
parental guidelines that mediation researchers have identiﬁed. This question is important
to answer because the effect studies associated with these parental guidelines could be
partially attributed to noncompliance, rather than the effectiveness of the strategy.

Therefore, the ﬁrst research question put forth by this study is:

RQl: Do children comply with their parent’s guidelines for television?

Second, this study aims to integrate psychological variables associated with other
compliance behaviors into the media literature in order to enrich the understanding of
parental mediation. An ecological framework suggests that environmental factors like
behavioral similarity and parenting style are important factors in the system of the many
variables that can affect the choice parents make for guidelines associated with television
use and whether children follow those guidelines (Bronfenbrenner, 1979). In addition,
interdisciplinary comparisons help to guide research questions and conﬁrm processes
across different types of social behaviors.

Other researchers have contributed to the media literature by applying
psychological principles and concepts to the study of media effects on children (Cantor,
1998; Bandura, Ross & Ross, 1963; Singer & Singer, 2001). Cantor (1998) has
referenced Piaget’s (2000) stages of cognitive development to help guide research on

how well children can interpret messages on television. Similarly, psychological models

24

have been applied to media effects research by psychology academics such as Albert
Bandura in his famous Bobo doll studies (Bandura, 1978). In addition, a handbook of
children and the media was put together by Singer & Singer (2001) in order to appeal to
many groups of researchers, including child development and communication. And
several researchers have used environmental factors in their study of mediation as well
(i.e., Buerkel-Rothfuss & Buekel, 2001; Warren et al., 2002; Warren, 2003, 2005). These
researchers have created a bridge between psychology, ecological frameworks and
communication research within the media realm and this study hopes to contribute to that
body of research.

In addition, it is important for researchers to test whether the results from child
development researchers are in fact consistent in media research. The communication in
child psychological studies is typically between individuals or family based. The media
research environment also has interpersonal and family communication but introduces a
new interaction, a one way communication from the television to the viewer. Therefore,
social scientists cannot just apply ﬁndings from one discipline to another. Comparisons
need to be made because the direction of communication ﬂow changes how the
established model operates.

Given this rationale, there are a few questions this research study can answer that
will enrich our understanding of parental mediation and will introduce psychological
variables into the process. The goal is to establish the effect of goodness of ﬁt and
parenting style on a parent’s efforts to mediate television viewing. The research has
established that compliance is related to the goodness of ﬁt between parent and child

temperament styles and the parenting style in the home. When the ﬁt is good, research

25

has established that children are more likely to follow the rules. It seems that this occurs
because the good ﬁt probably makes a parent more likely to understand what their child
seeks from television because they probably have similar needs ﬁom television.
Therefore, the child is more likely to comply with the parent's choice of mediation style
because their guidelines more likely address the child’s needs. Parenting style is also
related to the process where more involved, non-controlling parents (authoritative) have
been ’shown to choose mediation styles that are associated with better outcomes. In
addition, authoritative parenting is associated with more compliance than authoritarian
and permissive parenting styles. In general studies on parenting style have found that the
more involved and the less controlling a parent, the better their children responded to
their requests. Given this rationale, this study anticipates that authoritative parenting will
result in the most compliance, permissive the least and authoritarian somewhere in the
middle.

Many investigations have tested temperament, parenting style and compliance
simultaneously, which have examined behavioral characteristics such as problem
behavior (i.e., Brar, 2003), childhood injury (i.e., Schwebel et al., 2004), and social
competence (i.e., Rubin et al., 2002). These studies focus on undesirable behavioral
outcomes that are reduced with the use of certain parental discipline. Similarly, this study
focuses on problematic television content, or content associated with negative effects
from television exposure. The hope is that compliance to more effective parental
mediation guidelines will result in a reduction in the negative effects from exposure to

such content.

26

Based on this rationale, the model presented in Figure 1 will be tested in this

investigation. The expected relationships are as follows:

H1: As goodness of ﬁt on temperament increases, child compliance to mediation

will increase.

H2: For each style of parental mediation, it is anticipated that children who have a
parent that is the authoritative parenting style will demonstrate the greatest child
compliance to parental mediation, followed by children who have a parent who
has an authoritarian parenting style. The least child compliance to parental

mediation is predicted to result from the permissive parenting style.

 

 

 

 

Goodness of Fit \\5 Child Compliance to
/ Mediation

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Parenting Style

 

 

 

 

Figure 1. Research Model

Additional Research Questions

In addition to the main questions for this research study, a few additional
questions can be answered from the data collected. It was mentioned earlier that parents
and children tend to report different information when asked about media related

activities (Fujioka & Austin, 2003; Greenberg et al., 1971; Rossiter & Robertson, 1975).

27

Parental discipline is a sensitive topic and could result in subjects wanting to please the
researcher (Rossiter & Robertson, 1975). Because participants in studies on parental
mediation usually vary across studies to be parents or children, this study will take the
opportunity to document the difference in parent and child answers when asked about
parental mediation guidelines, compliance, and compare that to their differences on
temperament. Perhaps, differences on stable characteristics can explain different reports
on other behaviors. Moreover, this presents an opportunity to see how discrepant answers
are for these types of parental guidelines and whether researchers need to change their
methodology to more accurately interpret what mediation strategies are used and how

often. Therefore, the following research questions will be explored:

RQ2: Do child and parent reports of mediation styles and child compliance to

those mediation styles differ from each other?

RQ3: Are the differences between parent and child reports on mediation styles
and child compliance to those mediation styles correlated with the goodness of ﬁt

on temperament between a parent and child?

Finally, the data allows an analysis of the combined effect of parentingstyle and
mediation style on compliance. Each mediation style matches very clearly to a parenting
style and the studies that have investigated parenting style and family communication
patterns do suggest that certain parental disciplines are associated with mediation

guideline choices (Abelman, 1999, 2001; Buijzen & Valkenburg, 2005; Fujioka &

28

Austin, 2002; Greenberg et al., 2002; Walsch et al., 1998; Warren et al., 2002). Active
mediation matches with authoritative, restrictive mediation with authoritarian and passive
co-viewing with permissive parenting. Although a few mediation studies have looked at
the relationship between parenting styles and the use of certain mediation styles, a study
has not investigated the predictive power of the combination of parenting style and
mediation style on compliance. This study is a good opportunity to do such an analysis
because compliance to mediation has a direct connection to both of these variables. Also,
this analysis contributes to our understanding of these psychological variables
explanatory power for media processes. This question answers whether media related
characteristics have more predictive power than psychological related characteristics.

Therefore, one ﬁnal research question is advanced:

RQ4: What is the relative effect of parenting style and parental mediation style on

child compliance to mediation?

29

METHOD

Participants

A total of 351 parents were contacted about the study and were asked to ﬁll out a
survey and if their child could be interviewed at school. The response rate was 31%, with
a total of 107 parents who responded that their child could be interviewed and one parent
who ﬁlled out the survey but said their child could not be interviewed. Five of the child
interviews had to be excluded because the child was not able to respond adequately to the
questions because they spoke English as a second language. Therefore, 102 parent and
child pairs were able to be used in the analysis for this project.

Elementary and middle schools in the Holt, East Lansing and Okemos areas of
Michigan participated in the project. As noted earlier, middle childhood, between 7‘ and
12 years of age, was the target age for children in this study. In addition, Nathanson
(2001,) suggests that children between second and sixth grade usually provide a sample
that is not too young or too old to receive a range of mediation styles. A total of ten
classrooms agreed to participate in the study, which included two 2"" grade, two 3rd
grade, one 4’” grade, two 5’“ grade and three 6’" grade classrooms. Four of the classrooms,
which were ﬁfth and sixth grade, were team taught so they included double the number of
students.

The majority of the parent participants were mothers (82%), but also fathers
(14%), stepfathers (2%), stepmothers (1%), and female guardians (1%) ﬁlled out the

survey. Parents on average were 39 years old (SD = 6.87, Range = 26.00 — 62.00).

30

Parents reported that most children had at least one sibling (M = 1.67, SD = 1.23, Median
and Mode = 1.00, Range = 1.00 — 7.00) and were ﬁrst in the birth order (M = 1.83, SD =
1.18, Median = 2.00, Mode = 1.00, Range = 1.00 — 8.00). For the children, 58% were
female and 42% were male and they ranged in age from 7 to 12 years old (M = 9.74, SD
= 1.51).
Procedure

A packet was sent home with each eligible child for their parent or guardian to
review. This packet included a consent form for both the parent and child to participate in
the study and a survey for the parent to ﬁll out. The instructions detailed that the parent
who sets the guidelines for the child’s use of television was to ﬁll out the survey. The
child’s name was included throughout the survey in order to keep reminding the parent of
what child in their home to think of when they ﬁlled out the survey. The instrument
included questions to assess the parent’s temperament, parenting style, mediation style,
child compliance to that mediation, and demographics. In order to answer the questions
about mediation style and compliance, parents were asked if their child watches programs
from a list of problematic Saturday morning programs. If the parent reported that their
child does not watch any of the programs on the list they were instructed to stop the
survey at that point. In order to obtain all relevant information, demographic information
was collected in the middle of the survey, after questions about temperament and
parenting style, but before the questions about television shows. If the parent returned
both a consent form and a completed survey then their child could be interviewed and the

data could be used for analysis.

31

Children were interviewed at their school by trained undergraduate and graduate
students. Training was administered by the primary researcher so that each interviewer
was comfortable going at a reasonable pace for children of this age and able to handle
misunderstood questions. Also, interviewers used a response option card so that children
could easily identify and remember what options they had for answering the questions
(see Appendix B). In addition, the interview was written so that the child was asked about
the guidelines set by the parent who ﬁlled out the survey. Each question reminded the
child to think about; for example, their mom, dad or guardian when answering the
questions. Children were asked about their own temperament, their parent’s mediation
style, their compliance to that mediation style, and demographics. As with the parents,
children were asked if they watch any programs from a list of problematic Saturday
morning shows. If they answered that they did not watch any of the programs they
stopped the interview at that time. Again, demographic information was administered
before the question about television shows they view in order to get all relevant
information for each participant. Both the parent survey and child interview had multiple
orders, which resulted in no order effects.

Measures (See Appendix A for the Parent Survey and Appendix B for the Child
Interview)

Each measure is summarized below with descriptive and reliability infomation
provided. Reliability was evaluated based on Nunnally’s (1978, p. 245) recommendation
that an alpha at or above .70 is acceptable. However, lower reliability may be considered
adequate when a new measure is being tested in order to ﬁnd out how to reﬁne the

measure and increase its usefulness (Hocking, Stacks, & McDermott, 2003, p. 135).

32

Temperament. In order to determine the goodness of ﬁt estimate both the parents
and children answered questions to measure their own temperament. This was measured
with only three dimensions (Activity Level-Sleep, Approach/Withdrawal, Task
Orientation) of the Windle and Lerner (1986) 54-item revised DOTS-R temperament
scale. The decision was made to test fewer dimensions to reduce the length of the survey
so that more participants were likely to take part in the study. These dimensions were
chosen because they have been associated with television viewing in past research
(Sherry, 1998). This resulted in a 19-item scale. Response options for all dimensions
were the recommended options with one additional category that captured answers that
fell somewhere in the middle: “usually FALSE,” “more FALSE than true,” “in the
MIDDLE,” “more TRUE than false,” and “usually TRUE.”

The original DOTS scale was developed in order to effectively test temperament
at different ages (Lerner, Palermo, Spiro & Nesselroade, 1982). The revision of the scale
resulted in more response options, rewording of some ambiguous items and some items
being modiﬁed, excluded and generated to improve the measurement of temperament
with this scale. This version of the scale has been used to reliably test temperament in
children, adolescents and young adults (Windle, 1992). There are three versions of the
scale, one for young children from preschool to third or fourth grade which is intended to
be ﬁlled out by a parent or guardian that knows the child very well (Windle & Lerner,
1986). A version also exists for older children (from late elementary school through high
school) and for adults (after high school) which are intended to be ﬁlled out by the
individual themselves to assess their own temperament (Windle & Lerner, 1986). This

study made the decision to use the older child version for all of the children in the study

33

so that data collection could be consistent across all of the children, instead of some
temperament items about the child being ﬁlled out by the child and some by parents.

On the survey for parents and the interview for children one of the differences are
the instructions for how to answer the questions. In addition, sometimes the wording of
the statement was still hard to understand for the child, so some of the statements had to
be repeated in slightly different language. Problems with understanding the statements
were identiﬁed within the ﬁrst 10 to 20 interviews and recommended rewording for
statements was added to the interview so that all interviewers used the same language
(see Appendix B). In general, this alternative wording was used for all of the second and
third grade interviews, this was the age group not intended to use this version of the scale,
and only for older children if they could not understand the statement.

The ﬁrst dimension was Activity Level-Sleep which is four items of statements
like “I move a great deal in my sleep.” Responses were averaged to form a single
Activity Level-Sleep score, where higher scores on the scale indicated greater levels of
this dimension. Responses from both parents (M = 3.21, SD = 1.32, Range = 1.00 — 5 .00,
a = .91) and children (M = 3.30, SD = 1.19, Range = 1.00 — 5.00, a = .83) resulted in
adequate reliability. One case had to be dropped from the parent analysis because the
individual did not respond to this dimension, so only 101 parents make up the descriptive
information above.

The second dimension was Approach/Withdrawal which is seven items of
statements like “I can make myself at home anywhere.” Responses were averaged to
form a single Approach/Withdrawal score, where higher scores on the scale indicated

greater levels of this dimension. For parents (M = 3.29, SD = 0.70, Range = 1.00 — 5.00, a

34

= .68) the responses were at a marginally adequate reliability level, but children (M =
3.45, SD = 0.62, Range = 1.83 — 5.00, a = .46) were very inconsistent with their answers.
One item was dropped from the parent scale because the inter-item correlations were not
consistent (a with all items = .71). The item was “I usually move towards new objects
shown to me.” For the children, the same item was dropped as well to calculate the above
means and to have a consistent measure across parents and children (a with all items =
.44). In the end, the entire dimension was dropped from the analysis of goodness of ﬁt
because the child answers were too inconsistent.

Finally, the third dimension was task orientation which is eight items. This
dimension is normally used to test pre-school and elementary school children and for
adult populations it is split into Distractibility and Persistence. This study used only Task
Orientation for both parents (M = 3.27, SD = 0.77, Range = 1.67 — 5.00, a = .81) and their
children (M = 3.28, SD = 0.71, Range = 1.67 - 5.00, a = .61) in order to effectively
compare their responses. The level of reliability for the child answers is unacceptable, but
may have occurred because the younger children were struggling to understand the
questions. Future research may want to adjust who answers these questions or reevaluate
the wording of the questions for younger age groups. This issue is discussed in more
detail in the discussion section, but the decision was made to use the child answers in the
estimate of goodness of ﬁt. The reliability was not low enough to disregard thescale
because the use of the scale with a younger group is similar to a test of a new measure.
Task Orientation included example items like “Once I take something up, I stay with it.”
Responses were averaged to form a single Task Orientation score, where higher scores on

the scale indicated greater levels of this dimension. For this dimension, two items were

35

dropped from both the parent (0. with all items = .83) and child (a. with all items = .65)
estimates because of inconsistent inter-item correlations. These items were “I stay with
an activity for a long time” and “Things going on around me can _n_o_t take me away from
what I am doing.”

Goodness of ﬁt. To derive a goodness of ﬁt estimate an absolute value difference
score was calculated by subtracting the mean of the child’s score on the temperament
dimensions from the mean of the parent’s score on the temperament dimensions.
Reliability problems with the dimension of Approach/Withdrawal for children required
that it be dropped from this estimate (M = 2.25, SD = 1.15, Range = 0.17 — 5.58).

Parenting style. A series of investigations by Robinson and his colleagues
(Robinson, Mandleco, Olsen, & Hart, 1995; Robinson, Mandleco, Olsen, & Hart, 2001)
resulted in a 32-item scale that reliably tests parenting styles according to the dimensions
suggested by Baumrind (1971) and Maccoby and Martin (1983). The scale has been
designed for parents to report on their own parenting style and these questions were only
asked of the parent in this study. Response options for all items were “never,” “once in
awhile,” “about half of the time,” “very often,” and “always.”

The authoritative parenting style contained 15 items. There are three sub-factors
within this style, the ﬁrst of which is the connection dimension, which has items like “I
am responsive to our child’s feelings and needs.” The next set of questions taps a
regulation dimension and contains items like “I emphasize the reasons for rules.” Finally,
there is an autonomy granting dimension with questions like “I take into account our

child’s preferences in making plans for the family.” Responses were averaged to form a

36

single authoritative parenting score, where higher scores on the scale indicated greater
levels of this parenting style (M = 4.14, SD = 0.44, Range = 2.67 - 4.87, a = .81).

I The authoritarian parenting style contained 12 items. There are three sub-factors
within this style as well. The ﬁrst of which is the physical coercion dimension, which has
items like “I use physical punishment as a way of disciplining our child.” The next set of
questions taps a verbal hostility dimension and contains items like “I yell or shout when
our child misbehaves.” Finally, there is a punitive dimension which has questions like “I
punish by taking privileges away from our child with little if any explanations.”
Responses were averaged to form a single authoritarian parenting score, where higher
scores on the scale indicated greater levels of this parenting style (M = 1.66, SD = 0.35,
Range = 1.08 -— 2.73, a = .69).

Finally, the permissive parenting style contains only ﬁve items, which are deﬁned
as an indulgent dimension. This dimension has items like “I give into our child when the
child causes a commotion about something.” Responses were averaged to form a single
permissive parenting score, where higher scores on the scale indicated greater levels of
this parenting style (M = 2.02, SD = 0.57, Range = 1.20 - 3.80, o. = .67). The reliability
estimates for both authoritarian and permissive parenting were both just under the
acceptable level because of a possible self perception bias. This is discussed in more
detail in the discussion section, but the decision was made to use the measures for
analyses.

Problematic content. A list of programs was used as a reference point for both
parents and children to think about when answering the questions about parental

mediation styles and the child’s compliance to those mediation styles. Choosing the

37

programs to reference is a very important part of measuring mediation styles. Nathanson
and her colleagues have developed the most reliable measurement of mediation and they
recommend asking about these styles in relation to both entertainment and
informational/educational television because parents do tend to use mediation techniques
differently depending on the content their child is viewing (N athanson, 1999). However,
the goal of this study is to understand when children comply with their parent’s
guidelines for television as a way of measuring how often they are being protected from
harmful television content. Therefore, problematic television content was tested.
According to the National Television Violence Study [NTVS], problematic content exists
in all programming aimed at children aired between 6 am. and 8 pm. (NTVS, 1998).
These investigations cite that children’s programming contains more high risk messages
than any other genre of television programming (NTVS, 1998). As a result, this
investigation selected Saturday morning programs as a sample because it contains many
hours of children’s programming and is aired on a day when parents are at home with
their children.

A recent content analysis by the Parents Television Council [PTC] (2006) stated
that the most common stations to air children’s television programming are ABC Family,
Cartoon Network, The Disney Channel, Nickelodeon, ABC, FOX, NBC, and the WB. The
PTC (2006) found that these programs aired between 7 am. and 1 pm. on Saturday
mornings. The Saturday morning program schedule of the cable company in the
geographic region of this sample (East Lansing Comcast) was obtained from tvguide.com
listings (2006). The program schedule was reviewed and children’s programming was

primarily available between the same 7 am. to 1 pm. timeslot on the same channels

38

listed above. Therefore, all the children’s programs within these tirneslots on the above
channels were considered for the list of problematic programs.

The next step was determining the criteria for selecting programs that were
problematic. Although NTVS (1998) has already determined that these programs are all
high risk, the television ratings system was used to select a group of programs that
parents may also identify as problematic when developing guidelines of television use for
their child. Although the ratings systems have problems and many parents are skeptical of
their usefulness (Greenberg & Hnilo, 2001), this was a way of reducing the number of
programs available to test. Therefore, ratings were identiﬁed for each of the programs
considered for the sample.

For children’s programs, the majority of television ratings are one of the
following: T V-Y, TV-Y 7, TV-Y 7-F V, TV-G, or TV-PG. Programs with the ratings TV-Y
and TV-G are appropriate for all ages, whereas TV-Y7 programs are designed for
children above 7 years old and more speciﬁcally “for children who have acquired the
developmental skills needed to distinguish between make-believe and reality” (TV
Parental Guidelines, 2006). TV-Y7-FV is deﬁned exactly the same as TV-Y7, but is
given this content label because it contains “fantasy violence which is more intense or
more combative than other programs in this category” (TV Parental Guidelines, 2006).
And ﬁnally, programs rated TV-PG are programs that “parents may ﬁnd unsuitable for
younger children” (TV Parental Guidelines, 2006). Given the deﬁnitions of the TV
ratings and the age of the sample, programs labeled as TV-Y7, TV-Y7-FV and TV-PG

were considered the most problematic.

39

Even after narrowing down the list of shows to these ratings, 34 programs still
remained on the list. The ﬁnal list was determined by choosing ﬁve programs that are
designed for female child audiences, ﬁve for male audiences, and ﬁve for a mixed
audience. The goal was to ensure that all children in the sample had the best chance of
watching at least one of the shows on the list. The majority of programs rated at these
levels were designed for male audiences; therefore, it seemed important to choose these
non-randomly so that the females that were interviewed for the study had programs that
they were likely to watch.

Only four programs were clearly identiﬁed as shows for female audiences; these
included W.I. T.C.H, (Darcy ’s Wild Life, Bratz, and Winx Club. One additional popular
program for femaleswith a lot of visible physical violence was chosen to even out the
sample, Kim Possible, which is rated TV-G. For boys, the ﬁve programs chosen were
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, GI. Joe Sigma Six, Power Rangers, Ed, Edd n Eddy, and
Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends. Finally, for the mixed sample of shows three
programs were chosen from this list, Grim Adventures of Billy and Manny, Catscratch,
and Cartoon Cartoon Show, and the two most popular child programs on the Nielsen
Ratings top 10 popular program charts were used to add the last two shows to the mixed
group, Spongebob Squarepants and Fairly Odd Parents (Nielsen Media Research, 2006).
This helped to ensure that most children watched one of the shows.

On the survey for both parents and children these shows were listed and a “yes”
or “no” question was asked about whether the child watches any of the television
programs. If they even watched just one of the programs then the parent and the child

continued to ﬁll out the remainder of the survey. Of the 102 children that were included

40

in the analysis for the study, four children (4%) reported that they did not watch any of
these shows, while ten parents (10%) reported that their child did not watch any of these
shows. Because some of the parents and children reported that the child did not watch
these programs the sample size is referred to in each descriptive report of the mediations
styles and compliance questions.

Mediation styles. Over many years, Nathanson and her colleagues have developed
reliable measures for mediation, which typically include three mediation styles intended
to be asked of the parent: restrictive, active and co-viewing. This investigation asked both
parents and children about mediation used in the home. The questions aimed at parents
and children differ slightly, please refer to Appendix A and B to see the wording
differences for each item. Each scale for the different mediation styles asked the parent or
child to keep thinking of the types of programs (the problematic Saturday morning
programs) they were asked if the child watches when they answered these questions.
Response options for all mediation questions were “never,” “once in awhile,” “about half

9’ 6‘

of the time, very often,” and “always.”
The scale developed by Nathanson in 1999 was used as the inspiration for
developing new questions to assess a parent’s restrictive mediation. The scale by
Nathanson has been validated and shown reasonable reliability across investigations (or =
.82, 1999 study), but it does not tap all the different kinds of restrictive mediatiOn that
may occur and may inevitably exclude some parents because it does not address speciﬁc
types of rules. The ﬁrst question on the original Nathanson (1999) scale asks parents

whether they have rules about their child’s viewing of television programs. Response

options are “no,” “yes,” “1 limit how much my child can see this kind of show,” and “yes,

41

9 my child is not allowed to watch this kind of show a_t_aﬂ_’j (coded 0 through 2). If parents
report using rules, then they are asked to rate how strict they are in enforcing the rules on
a scale from 1 (not at all strict) to 5 (very strict). A score is created by multiplying the
two scores together. Higher scores indicate greater restrictive mediation. Therefore, a
new set of questions were developed to cover several different ways in which a parent
might have restrictions on television use in the home.

The new set of questions developed to measure restrictive mediation of parents
was a ﬁve item scale. For parents the questions were: “Do you have guidelines in place
about the times of day that your child can watch these types of television programs?,”
“Do you have guidelines in place about how much of this type of television your child
can watch (for example, hour or minutes per day, hours or minutes per week)?,” “Do you
have guidelines in place about what television stations your child can and cannot
watch?,” “Do you restrict your child to only watching television shows that have a
speciﬁc TV rating (like TVPG or TV14, etc.)?,” and “Do you restrict your child from
watching some of these television programs?”

For children the questions were: “Does your [i.e., mom] have rules about what
times during the day you watch these televisions shows?,” “Does your ___have rules

about how many hours or minutes each day or week you can watch these television

shows?,” “Does your have rules about what television stations you can and cannot
watch?,” “Does your only let you watch television shows that have certain TV
ratings (like TV PG or TV 14, etc.)?,” and “Does your only let you watch some of

these TV shows?” Each interviewer had a copy of what the TV ratings look like and their

deﬁnitions if a child did not understand that particular question. The word “rules” was

42

used for children and not parents because it would be easier for a child to understand.
Mediation was referred to as “guidelines” and “restrictions” for parents because
mediation can encompass more than just restrictions.

Responses were averaged to form a single restrictive mediation score, where
higher scores on the scale indicated greater levels of this mediation style. Responses from
the parents (M= 3.46, SD = 1.14, Range = 1.00 -— 5.00, n = 91, a = .85) resulted in
adequate reliability, but the child answers (M = 2.90, SD = 1.00, Range = 1.00 — 5.00, n =
98, a = .69) were just under the acceptable level. Considering this was a test of a new
measure, this reliability was considered acceptable. However, future analyses may just
want to use this measure with parents in order to obtain more reliable answers.

To test active mediation, a six item scale was used that was adapted by Yang’and
Nathanson (2005,) from three scales in other mediation studies (V alkenburg et al., 1999;
Austin, 1993; Austin, Bolls, Fujioka, & Engelbertson, 1999). Two of the items measure
positive mediation (e.g. “how often do you explain why some things actors do are good”,
“. . .tell your child that you like the show”), two capture negative mediation (e. g.

“. . .explain why some things actors do are ba ”, “. . .tell your child that something on TV
isn’t really so”), and two capture neutral mediation (e.g. “. . .explain the motives of TV
characters”, “Explain what something on TV really means”). Questions asked on the
child interview were worded slightly differently (see Appendix B). Also, one question on
the child interview, “how much does your _, tell you that something on TV isn’t
really so,” had to be clariﬁed for some children (see Appendix B). Responses were
averaged to form a single active mediation score, where higher scores on the scale

indicated greater levels of this mediation style. Responses from both parents (M = 3.11,

43

SD = 0.90, Range = 1.50 — 4.67, n = 89, a = .88) and children (M = 2.73, SD = 0.98,
Range = 1.00 — 4.83, n = 98, o. = .85) resulted in adequate reliability.

The measurement for co-viewing has just recently been modiﬁed in the Yang and
Nathanson (2005,) study. This scale measures both passive (four items) and intentional
co-viewing (four items). An example item for passive co-viewing from the parent survey
is “For the TV shows we mentioned earlier, how often do you watch the show together
because you both like the program” and for intentional co—vi‘ewing, “ ...watch the show
together for the beneﬁt of the child.” In this study comparison questions for children
could only be translated for passive co-viewing (see Appendix B). Intentional co-viewing
questions were still asked, but only from the parent. For passive co-viewing, responses
were averaged to form a single passive mediation score, where higher scores on the scale
indicated greater levels of this mediation style. Responses from both parents (M = 2.51,
SD = 0.96, Range = 1.00 - 5.00, n = 89, a = .89) and children (M = 2.57, SD = 1.05,
Range = 1.00 -— 5.00, n = 98, a = .85) resulted in adequate reliability. Parent’s reports of
intentional mediation were also reliable (M = 2.62, SD = 0.88, Range = 1.00 — 5.00, n =
90, a = .87).

Compliance. The last set of questions determined child compliance to each of
these mediation styles. For each set of mediation questions, corresponding compliance
questions for both the parents and children to answer were generated to measure the
deﬁnition of compliance provided in the literature review of this manuscript. Originally,
these questions were designed so that parents were only to answer the compliance
questions if they reported using that mediation style. But, many parents were confused by

the instructions and did not answer the corresponding compliance questions. The

instructions were changed and in subsequent data collection parents were given all
questions and not given speciﬁc directions about what questions to ﬁll out. This
procedure was much easier to follow and will be used in the future for similar data
collection. Because of this issue, samples sizes vary across the compliance data. For that
reason, sample sizes are reported here for all of the descriptive information provided for
each compliance scale.

Four compliance scores were generated ﬁ'om these questions for both the parents
and the children’s reports: the mean of the restrictive mediation compliance questions,
the mean of the active mediation compliance questions, the mean of the co-viewing
compliance questions and an overall mean of all compliance scores. Response options for
all sets of questions were “never,” “once in awhile,” “about half of the time,” “very
often,” and “always.” The questions below are the parent version of the questions. Please
see Appendix B for the questions from the child interview, which are almost exactly the
same.

Compliance to restrictive mediation questions were “Does your child follow these
guidelines/restrictions at home?” and “Does your child follow these
guidelines/restrictions when they are not with you?” Responses from both parents (M =
4.04, SD = 0.88, Range = 1.00 — 5.00, n = 56, a = .80) and children (M = 4.46, SD = 0.78.
Range = 1.50 — 5.00, n = 96, a = .73) resulted in adequate reliability.

For compliance to active mediation, the questions were “Does your child accept
your evaluations of the show’s content?,” “Does your child understand your evaluations
of the show’s content?,” “Does your child remember your evaluations of the show’s

content when you are at home?,” and “Does your child remember your evaluations of the

45

show’s content when they are not with you?" Responses from both parents (M = 3.64, SD
= 0.74, Range = 1.50 — 5.00, n = 69, a = .85) and children (M = 4.09, SD = 0.79, Range =
1.75 — 5.00, n = 96, a = .72) resulted in adequate reliability.

The co-viewing compliance questions were originally intended to measure
compliance to intentional co-viewing, but the questions respond to passive co-viewing
strategies as well. Because parental intentional co-viewing practices could not be asked
of both the parent and child because of the nature of the activity, these compliance
questions are thought of as compliance to co-viewing in general. The following questions
were asked: “Does your child respond positively to you watching TV with them?,” “Does

your child seek you out at home to watch TV with them?,” and “Does your child seek out
other adults to watch TV with them when they are not with you?” Responses ﬁom both
parents (M = 2.98, SD = 0.73, Range = 1.33 — 5.00, n = 75, a = .61) and children (M =
2.80, SD = 0.83, Range = 1.33 - 5.00, n = 90, a = .50) were unreliable and the results for
this type of mediation compliance should be interpreted with caution. This issue is
discussed further in the disCussion section.

Additionally, an overall compliance to mediation score was constructed by taking
the mean of all compliance scores for each type of mediation. An average score was
calculated for both parents (M = 3.49, SD = 0.65, Range = 1.00 — 5.00, n = 83) and
children (M= 3.81, SD = 0.62, Range = 1.88 — 5.00, n = 98).

Demographics. Finally, children and parents were both asked for demographic
information. In order to effectively control for variables that have been shown to have an
effect on mediation style in past studies, children were asked for their gender, age, and

birth order. Parents were asked for their gender, age, income, number of people in their

46

household, their occupation, and their child’s birth order. Income information was
unreliable so the income variable, number of people in the household, and the occupation
variables were dropped from the study. Parent gender was also not evaluated because
most parents who ﬁlled out the survey were females.

Only two variables resulted in any signiﬁcant relationship with the study
variables: the age of both the child and parent. The child’s age resulted in many
signiﬁcant correlations. In general children who were older received more authoritarian
(r(102) = .21, p < .05) and permissive (r(102) = .28, p < .01) parent discipline. Younger
children on the other hand were more similar to their parents on temperament (r(102) = -
.25, p < .05), were more likely to receive restrictive mediation (parent, r(91) = -.36, p <
.01; child, r(98) = -.26, p < .01) and to comply with that restrictive mediation (parent,
r(56) = -.27, p < .05; child, r(96) = -.34, p < .01). Finally, younger children were in
general more likely to comply with active (child, r(96) = -.26, p < .01) and co-viewing
mediation (parent, r(75) = -.28, p < .05) as well.

The parent age was only informative for co-viewing practices. For both the parent
report of passive (r(72) = -.26, p < .05) and intentional mediation (r(86) = -.23, p < .05),

as the parent’s age increased these practices decreased.

47

RESULTS

Descriptive statistics, reliability estimates, and zero-order correlations for all
measures are reported in Tables 1 and 2. Please note that the sample size varies across
variables because some parents misinterpreted the survey instructions and did not answer
all or any of the questions regarding child compliance to mediation. In addition, some of
the sample reported that the children did not watch the television shows asked about on
the survey. They were instructed, in that case, not to complete the remainder of the
survey, which included the questions about parental mediation style and child compliance
to mediation. Also, an overall child compliance score was constructed for both the parent I
report and the child report of child compliance to mediation by taking the mean of all
scores related to child compliance. Finally, effect sizes for mean differences are reported
using Cohen’s d (Cohen, 1988). The rule of thumb for interpreting this effect size is that a
small effect is anything below 0.20, a medium effect is anything between 0.20 and 0.80,
and a large effect is anything above 0.80.

Research Question I

The ﬁrst research question asked whether children comply with their parent’s
guidelines for television. A descriptive analysis of the reports from parents about child
compliance to mediation suggested that, on average, overall child compliance happens
“half of the time” (M = 3.49, SD = 0.65, Range = 1.00 — 5.00, n = 83). Parent estimates of
child compliance to restrictive mediation were, on average, “very often” (M = 4.04, SD =

0.88, Range = 1.00 — 5.00, n = 56). Child compliance to active mediation were reported

48

as mid-range by parents (M = 3.64, SD = 0.74, Range = 1.50 — 5.00, n = 69). And child
compliance to co-viewing mediation, according to parents, resulted in the least child
compliance (M = 2.98, SD = 0.73, Range = 1.33 — 4.33, n = 75).

Children also reported on their compliance to their parent’s mediation styles and
they reported similar answers, on average, to their parents. Children reported that their
overall child compliance happens about “half of the time” (M = 3.81, SD = 0.62, Range =
1.88 — 5.00, n = 98); child compliance to restrictive mediation was, on average, “very
often” (M = 4.46, SD = 0.78, Range = 1.50 — 5.00, n = 96); child compliance to active
mediation was also, on average, “very often” (M = 4.09, SD = 0.79, Range = 1.75 - 5.00,
n = 96); and co-viewing elicited the least child compliance (M = 2.80, SD = 0.83, Range
=1.33 — 5.00, n = 90). I

A paired samples t-test was used to examine the difference in the estimates of
restrictive, active and co-viewing child compliance for both reports from parents and
children. Mean comparisons revealed a signiﬁcant difference in the estimates of child
compliance, where child compliance to restrictive mediation was rated as the highest,
followed by child compliance to active mediation. Finally, the least child compliance was
reported for co-viewing mediation. This pattern was consistent for both reports. The
mean comparisons revealed signiﬁcant differences between all of the rated child
compliance levels (see Table 3 for these mean comparisons).

Hypothesis 1

The ﬁrst hypothesis predicted a negative linear relationship between goodness of

ﬁt on temperament (indicated by a lower score) and child compliance to mediation.

Goodness of ﬁt was calculated by taking the absolute value of the difference between the

49

mean of the child’s scores on the temperament dimensions used for the study (task
orientation and activity-sleep) and the mean of the parent’s scores. Although this was a
directional hypothesis, two-tailed bivariate correlations were computed to determine the
signiﬁcance of this linear relationship. This simpliﬁed the interpretation of the ﬁndings
and provided a more stringent test of the hypothesis. The results were computed for both
the parents’ and children’s responses to the child compliance questions. These were
subsequently corrected for attenuation because of the low reliability of some of the
children’s variables. This calculation corrects the correlation assuming perfect reliability
for each variable. Reliabilities used to calculate attenuated correlations are reported in
Table 1. It should be noted that a‘reliability estimate for goodness of ﬁt was estimated by
taking the average of the reliabilities for both parents and children for the dimensions of
temperament used in the goodness of ﬁt variable (task orientation and activity-sleep).
The responses from parents did not support this hypothesis. Although some
relationships were signiﬁcant, they were all in the wrong direction: child compliance to
restrictive mediation was positive (r(56) = .07, ns), child compliance to active mediation
was positive (r(69) = .22, ns), child compliance to co-viewing mediation was positive
(r(75) = .66, p < .01), and overall child compliance was positive (r(83) = .37, p < .01).
The responses ﬁ'om the children also supplied no support for this hypothesis. The results
were all non-signiﬁcant and mostly in the wrong direction: child compliance to restrictive
mediation resulted in a positive correlation (r(96) = .13, ns), child compliance to active
mediation was negative (r(96) = -.02, ns), child compliance to co-viewing mediation was
positive (r(90) = .03, ns), and overall child compliance was positive (r(98) = .05, ns).

Hypothesis 2

50

The second hypothesis predicted a non-directional relationship between parenting
style and child compliance to parental mediation. For each style of parental mediation, it
was anticipated that children who have a parent that is the authoritative parenting style
would demonstrate the greatest child compliance to parental mediation, followed by
children who have a parent who has an authoritarian parenting style. The least child
compliance to parental mediation is predicted to result from the permissive parenting
style.

This hypothesis was evaluated with two-tailed bivariate correlations. A set of
correlations was produced ﬁ-om the child compliance reports from both the parents and
the children and the parent reports of parenting styles. Again, these correlations were
corrected for attenuation and reliability estimates used for that correction can be found in
Table 1. In order to test for differences between these correlations, a 95% conﬁdence
interval was calculated around the correlations. This conﬁdence interval was then used to
evaluate whether the difference between two correlations can be attributed to chance.
This comparison is simply made by looking at the 95% conﬁdence interval around the
correlations, which includes the range of correlations that are not far enough away from
the actual correlation to be considered different. If a correlation is not included in the
conﬁdence interval of the correlation it is being compared with, then there is a 95%
chance that the two correlations are signiﬁcantly different. Differences were only tested
between variables that could potentially overlap on their conﬁdence intervals.

The reports from both parents and children of child compliance to parental

mediation established partial support for this hypothesis. The results are reported for

51

child compliance to each mediation style and within that section both the parent and the
child results are described (see Table 4 for correlations).

Child compliance to restrictive mediation. From the report from parents, the only
signiﬁcant correlation was a negative correlation between the permissive parenting style
and child compliance to restrictive mediation (r(56) = -.42, p < .01). This correlation (SE
= 0.16, p [-.73 S p S -.11] = .95) was not signiﬁcantly different from the correlation to
authoritative (SE = 0.14, p [-.31 S p S .23] = .95) or authoritarian parenting (SE = 0.13, p
[-.40 S p S .10] = .95).

The report from children resulted in a similar ﬁnding. Again, the only signiﬁcant
correlation was negative between child compliance to restrictive mediation and the
permissive parenting style (r(96) = -.29, p < .01). This correlation (SE = 0.11, p [-.51 S p
S -.07] = .95) was not signiﬁcantly different ﬁom the correlation to authoritative (SE =
0.10, p [-.07 S p S .33] = .95) or authoritarian parenting (SE = 0.10, p [-.17 S p S .23] =
.95). Therefore, a consistent ﬁnding for compliance to restrictive mediation was
established, where as permissive parenting increases, child compliance to restrictive
mediation signiﬁcantly decreases.

Child compliance to active mediation. Parent reports of the relationship between
child compliance to active mediation and each parenting style were all signiﬁcant. A
signiﬁcant positive correlation was detected between child compliance to active
mediation and the authoritative parenting style (r(69) = .25, p < .05) and a signiﬁcant
negative correlation was detected between compliance to active mediation and the
authoritarian (r(69) = -.36, p < .01) and permissive parenting styles (r(69) = -.36, p <

.01).l A conﬁdence interval was not needed to test the difference of the correlation

52

between the authoritative parenting style and child compliance to active mediation
because it was signiﬁcantly positive compared to the other two correlations which were
signiﬁCantly negative. Therefore, this correlation suggests that as authoritative parenting
increases, child compliance to active mediation increases. The correlation between child
compliance to active mediation and both of the other two parenting styles (authoritarian
and permissive) both resulted in exactly the same correlation. Therefore, a signiﬁcance
test was not necessary; no difference was detected. These two relationships both suggest
that as authoritarian or permissive parenting increases, child compliance to active
mediation decreases.

The reports from children resulted in only one signiﬁcant ﬁnding. A signiﬁcant
negative correlation was found between child compliance to active mediation and the
permissive parenting style (r(96) = -.23, p < .05). This correlation (SE = 0.11, p {-.45 S p
S -.01] = .95) was not signiﬁcantly different from the correlation to authoritative (SE =
0.10, p [-.30 Sp S .10] = .95) or authoritarian parenting (SE = 0.10, p [-.26 Sp S .14] =
.95). Similar to other results this ﬁnding suggests that as permissive parenting increases,
child compliance to active mediation decreases. 7

Child compliance to co-viewing mediation. Parent reports of child compliance to
co-viewing mediation resulted in similar correlations to each parenting style as child
compliance to active mediation. A signiﬁcant positive correlation was detected between
child compliance and authoritative parenting (r(75) = .46, p < .01), a signiﬁcant negative
correlation was found between child compliance to co-viewing compliance and the
authoritarian parenting style (r(75) = -.22, p < .05), and a signiﬁcant negative correlation

was found between child compliance to co-viewing mediation and the permissive

53

parenting style (r(75) = -.22, p < .05).2 As with the test of child compliance to active
mediation, the conﬁdence interval was not needed to test the difference of the correlation
between the authoritative parenting style and child compliance to co-viewing mediation
because it was signiﬁcantly positive compared to the other two correlations that were
signiﬁcantly negative. Therefore, this correlation suggests that as authoritative parenting
increases, child compliance to co-viewing mediation increases. The correlation between
child compliance to co-viewing mediation and both of the other two parenting styles
(authoritarian and permissive) resulted in exactly the same correlation. Therefore, a
signiﬁcance test was not necessary; no difference was detected. These two relationships
both suggest that as authoritarian or permissive parenting increases, child compliance to
co-viewing mediation decreases. ’

The child reports of compliance to co-viewing mediation resulted in no signiﬁcant
correlations to any of the three parenting styles. Therefore, no further testing was needed
for these variables.

Overall child compliance to mediation. Parent reports of overall child compliance
to parental mediation resulted in two signiﬁcant ﬁndings. A signiﬁcant negative
correlation was found between overall child compliance to mediation and the
authoritarian parenting style (r(83) = -.25, p < .01) and a signiﬁcant negative correlation
was found between overall child compliance to mediation and the permissive parenting
style (r(83) = -.49, p < .01). A 95% conﬁdence interval was calculated for each of these
variables to determine if the correlations are signiﬁcantly different from each other. The
intervals do not conﬁrm a signiﬁcant difference in these correlations. The correlation

V between overall child compliance to mediation and the authoritarian parenting style (SE =

54

0.12, p [-.49 S p S -.01] = .95) was not signiﬁcantly different from the correlation
between overall child compliance to mediation and the permissive parenting style (SE =
0.14, p [—.76 S p S -.22] = .95). Even though the strength of the relationship does not
differ, both of these correlations suggest that as authoritarian or permissive parenting
increases, overall child compliance to mediation decreases. The same conﬁdence interval
for authoritarian parenting was also not signiﬁcantly different from the correlation
between parental reports of overall child compliance and authoritative parenting (SE =
0.1 1, p [-.03 S p S .41] = .95). But, there was a signiﬁcant difference between the
correlation of child compliance to authoritative parenting (SE = 0.11, p {-.03 S p S .41] =
.95) compared to permissive parenting (SE = 0.14, p [-.76 Sp S -.22] = .95).

Finally, child reports of overall child compliance to mediation resulted in only
one signiﬁcant ﬁnding. Overall child compliance tomediation was signiﬁcantly
negatively correlated to permissive parenting (r(98) = -.24, p < .01). This correlation (SE
= 0.11, p [-.46 S p S -.02] = .95) was not signiﬁcantly different from the correlation to
authoritative (SE = 0.10, p [-.17 S p S .23] = .95) or authoritarian parenting (SE = 0.10, p
[-.24 S p S .16] = .95). Therefore, as permissive parenting increases, overall child
compliance to mediation decreases.

Additional Research Questions

Research question 2. One of the additional research questions this study addresses
is whether child and parent reports of mediation styles and child compliance to those
mediation styles differ from each other. In order to test these differences, two variables
were constructed. The ﬁrst, Mediation Style Differences, was obtained by taking the

absolute value of the difference between the parent’s report of their mediation style and

55

the child’s report of their parent’s mediation style. The second, Child Compliance
Differences, was the absolute value of the difference between the parent’s report of the
child’s compliance to their parental mediation and the child’s report of their compliance
to parental mediation (see Table 5). One-sample t-tests were conducted on each absolute
mean value difference to determine whether the mean differences were signiﬁcantly
different from zero (see Table 5). The results suggest that they are all signiﬁcantly
different from zero.

3 The next analysis tested whether the Mediation Style Differences variable was
different across mediation style and whether the Child Compliance Differences variable
was different across mediation style. Paired samples t-tests were used to analyze the
differences. There were no signiﬁcant differences by mediation style for the Mediation
Style Differences variable or the Child Compliance Differences variable (see Table 6).

Subsequently, another analysis was done to determine whether differences in
parent and child reports for parental mediation style were correlated to differences in
reports of child compliance to mediation. Therefore, the relationship between the
Mediation Style Differences variables and the Child Compliance Differences variables
was analyzed with two-tailed bivariate correlations, which were corrected for attenuation.
The reliabilities for each of the variables were averaged in order to correct for attenuation
(see Table 1 for original reliabilities). The analysis found that the Mediation Style
Differences variable and the Child Compliance Differences variable were signiﬁcantly
positively correlated for restrictive mediation (r(54) = .30, p < .05) and passive co-
viewing (r(68) = .34, p < .01), but the positive correlation for active mediation was not

signiﬁcant (r(66) = .23, p = .08). So, as the difference in reports increased between the

56

parent and child for the parent’s use of the restrictive and passive co-viewing mediation
styles, so did their reports of the child’s compliance to those mediation styles.

Finally, the last inquiry for this set of additional questions tested the mean
differences between parent and child reports on each type of parental mediation style and
child compliance to each mediation style. Paired-sample t-tests were used to analyze
whether each type of parental mediation style and child compliance to each mediation
style were different depending on whether the parent or child made the report. First, there
were two signiﬁcant differences for the test of mediation styles (see Table 7). Parents
reported using restrictive mediation more often (M = 3.45, SD = 1.13) than their child
reported parental use of restrictive mediation (M = 2.92, SD = 1.01), t(89) = 4.52, p < .01,
d = 0.48. Parents also reported using active mediation (M = 3.12, SD = 0.90) more often
than their child reported their use of active mediation (M = 2.79, SD = 0.98), t(87) = 2.65,
p < .05, d = 0.28.

The test of child compliance to each mediation style resulted in three signiﬁcant
differences between parent and child reports (see Table 7). Children reported greater
child compliance to active mediation (M = 4.09, SD = 0.82) than their parent reported (M
= 3.60, SD = 0.73), t(65) = -3.78, p < .01, d = 0.46. Parents reported greater child
compliance to co-viewing (M= 3.01.51) = 0.73) than their children reported (M= 2.69,
SD = 0.71), t(67) = 2.58, p < .05, d = 0.31. And ﬁnally, children reported greater overall
compliance to parental mediation (M = 3.77, SD = 0.59) than their parent reported (M =
3.49, SD = 0.66), t(81) = 2.92, p < .01, d = 0.32.

Research question 3. Another additiOnal research question analyzed whether

goodness of ﬁt on temperament was correlated with the Mediation Style Differences

57

variables and the Child Compliance Differences variables. A positive relationship was
predicted for both analyses, anticipating that as temperament differences increase, so will
differences on reports of parental mediation style and child compliance to mediation. A
two-tailed bivariate correlation was computed for each analysis and corrected for
attenuation using the same process as earlier tests. The correlation between goodness of
ﬁt and the Mediation Style Differences variables resulted in one signiﬁcant positive
correlation for passive co-viewing (r(88) = .23, p < .01). The other correlations were
positive but non-signiﬁcant: restrictive mediation (r(90) = .02, ns) and active mediation
(r(88) = .02, ns).

The correlation between goodness of ﬁt and the Child Compliance Differences
variables resulted in one signiﬁcant correlation in the hypothesized positive direction.
Goodness of ﬁt was signiﬁcantly positively correlated to the Child Compliance
Difference variable for co-viewing mediation (r(68) = .28, p < .05). Some of the
correlations between goodness of ﬁt and the remaining Child Compliance Difference
variables were signiﬁcant but they were all in the wrong direction: child compliance to
restrictive mediation was negative (r(54) = -.19, ns), child compliance to active
mediation was negative (r(66) = -.25, p < .05), and overall child compliance to mediation
was negative (r(82) = -.34, p < .01).

Research question 4. A ﬁnal additional question this study answered was the
relative effect of parenting style and parental mediation style on child compliance to
mediation. Six simple simultaneous linear regression analyses were conducted to answer
this question. For each regression, the independent variables were determined by

matching the parenting style and parental mediation style based on discipline strategy:

58

authoritarian parenting was matched with restrictive mediation, authoritative with active
mediation, and permissive with passive co-viewing. For each regression the matching
mediation style and parenting style were regressed on child compliance (restrictive,
active or co-viewing). Two regressions were conducted for each type of child
compliance; one that tested the parent’s answers and one that tested the children’s
answers (all six regression analyses are displayed in Table 8).

The ﬁrst two regression analyses tested child compliance to restrictive mediation.
The regression with child compliance to restrictive mediation reported by the parent as
the dependent variable resulted in a non-signiﬁcant overall model, F (2, 53) = 2.04, R2 =
.07, adj. R2 = .04, p = .14. The authoritarian parenting style (B = .002, p = .99) and
restrictive mediation reported by the parent (B = .27, p = .07) were both positive but non-
signiﬁcant predictors.

The regression with child compliance to restrictive mediation reported by the
child also resulted in a non-signiﬁcant overall model, F (2, 93) = 2.48, R2 = .05, adj. R2 =
.03, p = .09. The restrictive mediation variable reported by the child (B = .23, p < .05) was
a positive signiﬁcant predictor, authoritarian parenting style was not (B = .06, p = .54).

The second two regression analyses tested child compliance to active mediation.

The regression with child compliance to active mediation reported by the parent resulted
in a non-signiﬁcant overall model, F (2, 66) = 1.49, R2= .04, adj. R2 = .01 , p = .23. The
authoritative parenting style (B = .20, p = .12) and active mediation reported by the parent
(B = .03, p = .82) were both positive but non-signiﬁcant predictors.

The regression with child compliance to active mediation reported by the child

also resulted in a non-signiﬁcant overall model, F (2, 93) = 1.64, R2 = .03, adj. R2 = .01, p

59

= .20. Both predictors were non-signiﬁcant: the authoritative parenting style was
negatively related (B = -.11, p = .31) and active mediation reported by the child was
positively related (B = .17, p = .1 1).

The ﬁnal two regression analyses tested child compliance to co-viewing
mediation. The regression with child compliance to co-viewing mediation reported by the
parent resulted in a non-signiﬁcant overall model, F (2, 72) = 1.15, R2 = .03, adj. R2 =
.004, p = .32. Both predictors were non-signiﬁcant: the permissive parenting style was
negatively related (B = -. l 7, p = .17) and passive co-viewing reported by the parent was
positively related (B = .12, p = .34).

The regression with child compliance to co-viewing mediation reported by the
child resulted in a signiﬁcant overall model, F (2, 87) = 8.74, R2 = .17, adj. R2 = .15, p <
.01. Passive co-viewing reported by the child (B = .40, p < .01) was a signiﬁcant positive
predictor, the permissive parenting style was not (B = .06, p = .58).

Finally, intentional co-viewing was the only parental mediation style not
accounted for in the above analyses because there was no way to also ask children if their
parent uses that style of mediation. However, the child compliance to co-viewing
measure does tap child compliance to intentional co-viewing as well as passive co-
viewing. The correlations between intentional co-viewing and child compliance to co-
viewing (Table 2) do show a small positive correlation from both the answers from
parents (r(75) = .20, ns) and children (r(90) = .15, ns). Speciﬁcally, the correlation from
the parent answers would have been signiﬁcant with 90 subjects. Therefore, further

analyses were conducted.

60

Although the child compliance to co-viewing variable was analyzed with
permissive parenting for passive co-viewing, no correlation was detected between
intentional mediation and the permissive parenting style (r(90) = -.01, ns) (Table 2). A
stronger positive correlation was found between the intentional mediation style and the
authoritative parenting style (r(90) = .18, ns) and a negative correlation with the
authoritarian parenting style (r(90) = -.15, ns). Given the relationship of intentional co-
viewing to the parenting style and parental mediation style variables, four additional
simple simultaneous linear regressions were conducted to learn how intentional co-
viewing contributes to child compliance to co-viewing. The ﬁrst two analyses regressed
the authoritarian parenting style and intentional co-viewing on child compliance to co-
viewing for both the parent and child responses. The second two analyses regressed the
authoritative parenting style and intentional co-viewing on child compliance to co-
viewing for both the parent and child responses (see Table 9).

The ﬁrst two regression analyses tested the authoritarian parenting style with
intentional co-viewing regressed on child compliance to co-viewing. The regression with
child compliance to co-viewing mediation reported by the parent resulted in a non-
signiﬁcant overall model, F (2, 72) = 2.23, R2 = .06, adj. R2 = .03, p = .12. Both predictors
were non-signiﬁcant: the authoritarian parenting style was negatively related (B = -.l3, p

= .25) and intentional co-viewing reported by the parent was positively related (B= .20, p

.09).
The regression with child compliance to co-viewing mediation reported by the

child resulted in a non-signiﬁcant overall model, F (2, 80) = 1.02, R2 = .03, adj. R2 = .00,

61

p = .37. The authoritarian parenting style (B = .05, p = .66) and intentional co-viewing
reported by the parent (B = .16, p = .16) were both positive but non-signiﬁcant predictors.

The second two regression analyses tested the authoritative parenting style with
intentional co-viewing regressed on child compliance to co-viewing. The regression with
child compliance to co~viewing mediation reported by the parent resulted in a signiﬁcant
overall model, F (2, 72) = 6.07, R2 = .14, car. R2 = .12, p < .01. The authoritative
parenting style (B = .32, p < .01) was a signiﬁcant positive predictor, intentional co—
viewing reported by the parent was not (B = .21, p = .06).

The regression with child compliance to co-viewing mediation reported by the
child resulted in a non-signiﬁcant overall model, F (2, so) = 0.96, R2 = .02, aay'. R2 = .00,
p = .39. Both predictors were non-signiﬁcant: the authoritative parenting style was
negatively related (B = -.03, p = .78) and intentional co-viewing reported by the parent

was positively related (B = .16, p = .17).

62

DISCUSSION

A major goal of this study was to determine whether children comply with their
parent’s guidelines for television. The results for Research Question 1 suggest that
children follow their parent’s guidelines for television about half of the time overall. Both
parents and children reported that children comply with restrictive mediation very often,
with active mediation at least half of the time, and with co-viewing once in awhile. The
differences between mediation styles did yield medium to large effect sizes. This is an
encouraging ﬁnding because many mediation effect studies are based on the assumption
that children are following the guidelines that their parents give them for watching
television. This offers evidence that compliance is relatively common. However,
compliance does not happen evenly across all types of mediation; therefore, studies that
look at the effect of certain mediation types should alter the interpretation of that effect
based on this ﬁnding. For example, passive mediation is associated with the least positive
outcomes in effect studies (Dorr et al., 1989; Nathanson, 1999; Rothschild & Morgan,
1987) and that might be the case because children are the least likely to comply with this
mediation style.

Although these ﬁndings were consistent across child and parent reports, results
for compliance to co-viewing should be interpreted with caution. The co-viewing
compliance reports from children (a =.50) and parents ((1 =61) had unacceptable
reliability. Because parents and children had acceptable reliability for their report of the

co-viewing mediation style, these reliability problems suggest that the questions used to

63

measure compliance to co-viewing could be invalid. The intent of the measure was to
capture the openness of children to their parent viewing television with them. However,
the responses of the parents and children suggest that openness to viewing together does
not represent compliance to co-viewing. One possible reason for the validity issue is that
compliance to co-viewing may be hard to capture. Co-viewing is deﬁned as parents
watching television with their child and does not include interaction verbally or
nonverbally. Therefore, no explicit regulations are associated with co-viewing. Because
these guidelines are not speciﬁcally described to children as a guideline for watching
television, it could be hard for parents and children to estimate the child’s compliance to
this monitoring style. Therefore all results for compliance to passive mediation should be
interpreted with caution.

Another methodological issue is inadequate sample size for some of the estimates
of child compliance. During data collection, many parents misinterpreted instructions
associated with the compliance questions and did not answer them all. Changes were
made to the instructions and this resulted in parents ﬁlling out all of the compliance
questions. Although these instructions were problematic, it is encouraging that the results
between parents and children were still very similar even though there was a signiﬁcant
difference in sample size. For this particular question the power was ample to detect
signiﬁcant effects, but for later questions power was insufﬁcient.

Temperament and Compliance

A second goal of the paper was to see how psychological characteristics that are

ecologically important to a child’s environment and development can affect a child’s

compliance to their parent’s mediation guidelines. The psychological variables used were

64

(1) the similarity betheen a parent and child on temperament characteristics associated
with media use, and (2) the parenting style or general discipline strategy of the parent.

Hypothesis 1 addressed similarity on temperament characteristics, labeled as
goodness of ﬁt, and predicted that as goodness of ﬁt increased, child compliance to
parental mediation would also increase. This hypothesis was not supported; the analysis
found the opposite pattern of results for both parent and child reports. Results like this
indicate that researchers cannot just borrow patterns of relationships from other
disciplines without testing. For some reason, this well tested psychological ﬁnding did
not translate for television mediation.

There are several possible explanations for this result. First, conceptual
explanations are explored. One possibility is that similarity leads to a parent trusting that
their child will follow their guidelines because the parent and child behave in similar
ways. This trust may lend itself to easy deception by the child. Similarly, the child may
be better at knowing how to get away with things when they are similar to their parent. If
the parent and child are different on temperament, this may lead to parents having stricter
enforcement of their mediation guidelines because the difference in behavioral
disposition results in the child disobeying parent expectations for behavior more often.
The attention by the parent to child compliance with their guidelines may result in greater
compliance because the child does not want to get in trouble. A ﬁnal explanation is that
children who have a good ﬁt on temperament with their parent may be more likely to
interpret their parents viewing habits as acceptable behavior. Research conﬁrms that
parents who co-view with a child more often give the impression that the material is

acceptable (Salomon, 1977; Nathanson, 2001b). In this study the zero-order correlation

65

between goodness of ﬁt and the child’s report of passive co-viewing (r(98) = -.21, p <
.05) does suggest that a similar temperament between parent and child leads to more
passive co-viewing by a parent.

Outside of conceptual reasons for this result, the method of data cellection may
also provide some viable reasons for this ﬁnding. To start with, this study only used three
temperament dimensions from the nine dimension temperament concept. These
dimensions were chosen because they were associated with television viewing
motivations in another study (Sherry, 1998), but there is the possibility that different
dimensions effect compliance compared to motivation.

Moreover, even though the temperament measure has been reworked and reﬁned
over the years, there were face validity problems .with some of the statements. As the
methods section described, some children had trouble interpreting speciﬁc words and the
meaning of some of the statements. The words that created the most problems were
“task,” “distract,” “persist,” and “reject.” Statements that were hard to understand were “I
stay with an activity for a long time,” “I usually move towards new objects shown to
me,” “On meeting a new person I tend to move towards him or her,” and “My ﬁrst
, response to anything new is to move my head toward it.” Even though alternative
wording was developed, children were still unreliable in their answers to some of the
questions. The task orientation dimension only yielded a reliability estimate of .61 , which
should be interpreted with caution, and the approach/withdrawal dimension was dropped
from the analysis because of unreliable answers. This problem may partly be because the
series of investigations that developed this measure did not use these questions on

children in second and third grades; parents answered the questions for children of

66

younger ages (Windle & Lerner, 1986). It would be helpful for future research to test out
the most effective wording of these questions for children in this age range because
middle childhood is an important age group to study in many disciplines and to have
consistent data collection sometimes you need to interview the child, not the parent.

Additionally, several of these statements could be interpreted as double-barreled.
Context can change the meaning of some of the statements. In fact, some children did
state that sometimes these statements are true and sometimes they are false depending on
what they are doing. This probably created a situation where many children rated these
questions as somewhere in the middle. Future research should work on creating different
versions of the statements for younger and older children and statements that are clearly
about one context. ’

A ﬁnal methodological limitation for Hypothesis 1 was the calculation of
goodness of ﬁt. One of the creators of the temperament scale used for the study was
consulted in order to determine the best way to capture goodness of ﬁt (Michael Windle,
personal communication, February 2, 2006). His suggestion of an absolute value
difference score was used and is a popular method for scientists who want to determine
agreement between two people (Glass & Polisar, 1987). However, alternative methods
have been used to calculate goodness of ﬁt in other studies. Some researchers use
correlation (Churchhill, 2003), a parent’s rating of children on undesirable characteristics
(Paterson & Sanson, 1999), an absolute value difference score between the child’s
temperament and what expectations parents have for their child’s behavior (Talwar et al.,

1990), and observation of parent and child interaction (Gordon, 1981).

67

Other calculations also exist outside of temperament studies. For example,
psychology researchers that study dyad similarity use a method developed by Glass and
Polisar (1987) which compares familiar dyads with randomly paired dyads to see if
similar others agree signiﬁcantly more than a random match. Butcher and Messick (1966)
use a method that converts raw values to t scores so that different standard deviations of
the raw scores do not affect the difference calculated. Similarly, McGraw and Wong
(1994) account for scores with similar standard deviations by calculating the relative
similarity given the range of responses of the subjects. These alternatives should be
considered for future studies to retest this hypothesis. Perhaps different measurement
could capture the deﬁnition of the variable or alternative analyses could be conducted to
better understand what effect goodness of ﬁt has on compliance to behaviors associated
with the media.

Parenting Style and Compliance

The other psychological variable tested in this examination was parenting style.
Hypothesis 2 predicted that authoritative parenting would bring about the most
compliance; permissive parenting the least compliance and authoritarian parenting would
result in compliance somewhere in between the other two parenting styles. Although this
exact pattern was not the result of the data analysis, partially consistent results were
obtained. In general, authoritative parenting was positively correlated with compliance,
while authoritarian and permissive parenting were negatively correlated with compliance.
HoWever, this pattern of results did differ between the parent and child reports. The only

ﬁnding that was consistent across reports was for permissive parenting, while

68

authoritative and authoritarian parenting resulted in no signiﬁcant correlations from the
child reports.

One of the reasons the expected pattern of relationships did not occur for this
hypothesis could be the restriction in range of the parenting styles. It was anticipated that
parenting style would have some restriction in range because previous investigations note
that most subjects are typically classiﬁed as authoritative, the least permissive and
authoritarian somewhere in the middle (Chipman, Olsen, Klein, Hart, & Robinson, 2000;
Lambom, Mounts, Steinberg, & Dombusch, 1991; Steinberg, Lambom, Darling, Mounts,
& Dombusch, 1994). This sample did ﬁnd that authoritative parenting was rated high by
most parents, but authoritarian and permissive parenting both had about the same low
range.

One likely explanation for the high scores from parents on the authoritative
parenting style is that parents who participate in voluntary activities that their child brings
home ﬁ'om school are probably more involved in their children’s lives. This project did
involve a relatively lengthy survey for parents to ﬁll out at home during their leisure time.
In addition, a few parents from one school in the study did’express concern to the
teachers about the authoritarian questions that had to do with corporal punishment. It was
later revealed that the school had an incident in the past having to do with mistreatment
by a parent. This school was extra sensitive to these questions and parents probably were
not as honest with their answers for fear that their parenting behavior would be
interpreted as abusive. This situation was addressed by assuring the teachers that the
questions could not detect parental abuse. However, the parent inquiries decreased

teacher enthusiasm. As a result, fewer surveys were returned and some teachers were less

69

likely to attempt explanations to the parents. In the end, this also affected the reliability of
both the authoritarian and permissive parenting scales such that they resulted in levels of
reliability just under the acceptable level. Future research should also consider asking
children about parental discipline. If both parents and children are asked about this
variable, then a more accurate estimate of the household discipline could be obtained.
Another related explanation is that the cities where the data was collected are
easily classiﬁed as middle to upper class neighborhoods. A study by Coolahan,
McWayne, Fantuzzo, and Grim (2002) used a longer version of the same parenting style
questionnaire from this study to examine low-income African-American families. They
found that a lower education and being single rather than married increased the likelihood
of using authoritarian or permissive parenting styles. This suggests that the results from
this study only represent a higher socio-e'conomic group of individuals and are not
generalizable to a larger population of parents. ‘In the future, data collection should occur
in a more diverse set of schools so that a better spread of parenting styles can be obtained.
The power of the correlation test was also decreased because so many parents did
not ﬁll out all of the compliance questions, which in turn, affected the pattern of results.
For example, if each set of compliance estimates had 100 subjects, the correlation
between authoritative parenting and overall compliance reported by the parent would
have been signiﬁcant. If this result was signiﬁcant, then the overall compliance reported
by the parent would have resulted in the expected pattern with all three parenting styles.
But additional power would not be enough to change the results obtained from the child
reports of compliance. One explanation for these differences in effects could be the

reliability of the answers, but these correlations were corrected for attenuation to account

70

for those issues. Although that does not ﬁx the problem, it does adjust the correlation to
reﬂect what it would be if there were no reliability issues. Therefore, the best explanation
for such different ﬁndings from the parents and children is that children and parents
answered these questions differently from each other. Table 7 shows the difference in the
way parents and children reported compliance to each type of mediation guideline.
Children more often reported greater compliance to their parent’s guidelines than the
parent reported. The only exception was for co-viewing compliance and this ﬁnding may
be the result of validity issues with the measurement of the variable as described in the
explanation of Research Question 1. For a description for why these differences may
have occurred, please see the section on Research Question 2.

Additional Research Questions ’

Besides the three questions that addressed the main goal of the study, additional
questions were also answered from the data. First, Research Question 2 locked at a
comparison between parent and child reports. Other investigations have noted that
parents and children typically give different accounts of what happens in the home
related to television use and restrictions (Greenberg et al., 1971; F ujioka & Austin, 2003;
Rossiter & Robertson, 1975). The results confrrrned that parents and children do give
signiﬁcantly different accounts of what guidelines parents have for television in the
home. Unique to this study, the data suggest that parents and children also differ in their
aCcounts of child compliance with parental mediation guidelines.

The discrepancies in reports were not signiﬁcantly different across mediation
style or compliance to mediation. Differences were based on who responded to the

questions, parents or children. Parents were more likely to report a greater use of

71

restrictive and active mediation guidelines than their child reported and the child was
more likely to report that they complied with their parents guidelines overall and
speciﬁcally for active mediation than the parent reported. The only ﬁnding that goes
against this pattern was for co-viewing; children reported complying less often than the
parent reported. Again, the unreliability of the co-viewing measure suggests that the
questions are not a valid indicator of co-viewing compliance.

For both parents and children, self perception seems to be a probable reason for
the differences in their reports. Any self-report measure always runs the risk of obtaining
inaccurate information, especially when the answer could be socially unacceptable or
. embarrassing (Millon & Lerner, 2003). Past studies have found that parents and children
disagree on how much children watch television, how many media rules are in the home,
and how much media is discussed (Greenberg et al., 1971; Rossiter & Robertson, 1975).
This tendency to disagree has been associated with a social desirability bias in other
comparisons (Desmond, Singer, Singer, Calarn, & Colirnore, 1985; Fujioka & Austin,
2003; Rossiter & Robertson, 1975). Desmond et al. (1985) found that parents report
inaccurate information because they want to appear like “good” parents who protect their
children from harmful inﬂuences. Fujioka and Austin (2003) speciﬁcally found that
parents report fewer instances of mediation with a positive valence because children
interpret these as an endorsement of the content.

As mentioned earlier, some of the parents were concerned about the corporal
punishment parenting questions because they thought they were attempting to identify
abusive parenting practices. These parents may have overcompensated in their answers to

the mediation guideline questions to make themselves look better in other aspects of

72

parental discipline as well. But, the parent’s answers to the child compliance questions do
not reﬂect this tendency. They may have provided a more honest account of their child’s
compliance because it reﬂects the child’s behavior, not their own. This reﬂects a true self
perception motivation, rather than family perception. Furthermore, the children may have
provided inaccurate information on the child compliance questions because they were
afraid their parent would see their answers on the survey. The children were informed
that their parent was not going to see their answers to the survey, but it was not
systematically integrated into the interview process. Additionally, the children’s answers
could also reﬂect a social desirability bias, in that they want to appear like a “well-

behaved” child to the researcher. Both of these explanations suggest a tendency to
J’overcompensate only for ones own behavior.

Although there were no systematic discrepancies within mediation styles and
compliance to mediation styles, active mediation was discrepant between parents and
children for both the estimate of the mediation style and compliance to the mediation
style. In past studies, researchers have found that correlations between parent and child
reports tend to be lower when describing more abstract rather than concrete events
(Ritchie & Fitzpatrick, 1990; Tirns & Masland, 1985). Active mediation is more abstract
in its application than restrictive mediation because it involves critical evaluation of
program content, whereas restrictive mediation involves implementing concrete V
restrictions. ’

Similarity between answers has also considered age as a potential moderator of
the ﬁndings. Greenberg et a1. (1971) suggested that as children get older mothers may be

less capable of accurately reporting their child’s behaviors. Fujioka and Austin (2003)

73

also reported from a sample of third, sixth and ninth graders that children in higher grades
perceive television messages more positively and expect more positive outcomes from
viewing. Considering these frndings, correlations were calculated between the child and
parent’s age with the Mediation Style Difference and Child Compliance Difference
variables. No signiﬁcant correlations were found between parent or child age and the
differences in reports; however, this was mainly because of a lack of power. Like
Greenberg et a1. (1971) predicted above, as a parent’s age increased the difference
between answers on compliance to active mediation also increased (r (64) = .22, ns). For
children the differences on both restrictive compliance (r (54) = .25 , ns) and overall
compliance (r (82) = .20, ns) increased with age, in addition to the differences on reports
of passive mediation (r (88) = .19, ns). The passive mediation correlation, in particular,
may be a result of children wanting to appear like they don’t watch television with their
parents as they get older. In the discussion of the Greenberg et al. (1971) paper, the
question was posed whether children overestimate viewing television because they want
to appear “cool” to their peers.

The next additional question, Research Question 3, answered by this study was
whether similarity between a parent and child on temperament characteristics, goodness
of ﬁt, was correlated with their likeliness to report similar information about behavior
related to television. No correlation was found between goodness of ﬁt and similarity on
reporting mediation guidelines in the home. The only signiﬁcant positive correlation was
between compliance to co-viewing mediation and temperament, while the remaining
correlations with compliance variables were negative. Given the reliability problems with

the compliance to co-viewing variable, this relationship needs to be retested with

74

alternative measurement. Similarly, there are interpretation problems with the
temperament questions. Other dimensions should be investigated and the deﬁnition for
calculating goodness of ﬁt should be reconsidered in future studies.

The ﬁnal additional question, Research Question 4, locked at the relative impact
of parenting style and mediation style on child compliance to parental mediation. Overall,
these ﬁndings suggest that mediation guidelines contribute to the variance of child
compliance to mediation more than parenting style does. For restrictive mediation, both
parent and child accounts suggest that restrictive guidelines contribute to compliance
with those guidelines and the authoritarian parenting style does not. Although the parent
report did not result in a signiﬁcant contribution from restrictive mediation guidelines,
this can be explained by the reduction in power because of sample size. Moreover,
although the use of restrictive mediation seems to be contributing to the compliance to
these guidelines the contribution to the variance of this variable is not that notable given
the non-signiﬁcant models that resulted in effect sizes of only 5% and 7%. This suggests
that these models are lacking an important variable that can explain compliance
tendencies. Perhaps because there were problems with the authoritarian parenting
questions, authoritarian parenting may contribute to restrictive compliance more than this
result suggests. In the future if parents can be assured that their responses are
conﬁdential, perhaps that would change the results.

In fact, a study by Wachs, Gurkas, and Kontos (2004) used a similar deﬁnition for
compliance and they found that parental control contributed 7% of variance to committed
compliance, only 3% to situational compliance, and 12% for passive noncompliance.

Another study found that maternal control contributed 16% of the variance to an overall

75

noncompliance score, which included estimates of committed, situational and passive
noncompliance (Braungart-Rieker et al., 1997). Given these ranges, without a negative
reaction from parent’s to the authoritarian questions, the combination of both restrictive
mediation guidelines and authoritarian parenting would probably contribute more to
compliance to restrictive television guidelines.

Active mediation compliance resulted in non-signiﬁcant ﬁndings. Although they
were non-signiﬁcant, the contribution of sample size to the power of the analysis seemed
to be the primary reason again for the signiﬁcance levels, especially for the parent
reports. Moreover, the effect size did not suggest that the contribution of these variables
was that large. The general pattern of ﬁndings was that, within the parent reports,
authoritative parenting was associated with compliance to active mediation more than
were active mediation guidelines, but the model was non-signiﬁcant, only explaining 4%
of the variance for the model. On the other hand, the child reports found that active
mediation guidelines were related to compliance more than were the authoritative
parenting style, which also resulted in a non-signiﬁcant model, only explaining 3% of the
variance. The effect sizes were surprising here because other studies have suggested
larger contributions from positive parenting. For example, in a study by Martinez and
Forgatch (2001) positive parenting contributed 12% of the variance to noncompliance
and in another study a mother’s responsiveness to prosocial behavior contributed 46% of
the variance to a child’s compliance to their mother’s instructions (Goin & Wahler,
2001). It is important to note that these studies do deﬁne compliance as more situational
than committed, so perhaps that could be part of the reason that parenting style doesn’t

contribute more to the variance of compliance to television guidelines.

76

However, an additional reason for these small effect sizes and the opposite pattern
observed between parent and child reports could be that the mediation types are not
mutually exclusive. This seems especially to be the case for the intentional co-viewing
and active mediation guidelines. Although intentional mediation is deﬁned as a
dimension of co-viewing, studies have noted that intentional mediation has been
associated with active mediation practices (Yang & Nathanson, 2005b). In addition,
although non-signiﬁcant, this study found a notable positive correlation between
authoritative parenting and intentional co-viewing (r = .18, ns). The ﬁndings for
intentional co-viewing in Table 9 suggest that both the authoritative parenting style and
intentional co-viewing contribute to co-viewing compliance reports from the parent. In
fact, their combined effect resulted in a signiﬁcant model that explained 14% of the
variance for the parent’s reports about their child’s compliance to co-viewing. The
authoritarian parenting style was also tested as a predictor of co-viewing compliance
because it was correlated to intentional co-viewing as well. However, the model was non-
sigrriﬁcant and found that these predictors only explained 6% of the variance. Therefore,
according to the parent reports of compliance, authoritative parenting seems especially
important in predicting co-viewing and active mediation compliance. This implies that
the results for active compliance may result from parents referencing both their
intentional co-viewing and active mediation habits when they answer questions about
compliance to active mediation. Future research should attempt to construct new
instructions for the co-viewing and active mediation compliance questions and to try to

get parents to divide their thinking about mediation types as they answer.

77

This referencing of both intentional co-viewing and active mediation was
considered as a potential explanation for the large effect size (17%) found for co-viewing
compliance in the analysis of child reports of passive co-viewing. Although this
explanation is fruitﬁll, the data was inspected further and a more probable explanation for
this ﬁnding is a systematic bias in the answers that children provided for both the passive
co-viewing and compliance to co-viewing questions. The zero-order correlations
indicated a rather large positive correlation between the children’s answers on these two
measures (r = .41, p < .01). It seems that children were probably matching their answers
from the passive co-viewing questions to their answers to the compliance to co-viewing
questions. This created a situation where the two measures are partially representing the
same variable, which explains why a larger portion of the variance was explained. To
control for this problem in the future, as mentioned earlier, the deﬁnition of co-viewing
compliance needs to be reﬁned and new questions to measure the variable will then need
to be constructed.

Moreover, all of these results still estimate only low to medium effects sizes,
which suggest that other variables contribute to levels of compliance. Other variables that
have been studied in relation to compliance include personality variables like
aggressiveness (deBlois & Stewart, 1980), antisocial traits (deBlois & Stewart, 1980),
children’s memory of prior experiences (Goin & Wahler, 2001), and depression severity
(Belden & Luby, 2006). Aggressiveness contributed 25% of the variance to a combined
committed and situational noncompliance variable and antisocial traits contributed 8% of
the variance to the same variable (deBlois & Stewart, 1980). Depression severity only

contributed 3% to situational compliance on structured tasks (Belden & Luby, 2006) and

78

a child’s memory of personal experiences contributed an additional 10% of the variance
to situational compliance in another study that used structured tasks (Goin & Wahler,
2001). This suggests that variables like temperament might contribute some variance to
compliance. Although Hypothesis 1 did not suggest that goodness of ﬁt was correlated to
increased compliance, a change in this measurement could make this variable more
useful in a similar test of predictors of compliance. Also, the zero-order correlations
between the temperament dimensions and compliance to television guidelines do suggest
there could be a relationship between these variables. In the future, other personality
variables should be considered as possible contributors to mediation compliance as well.
Limitations

Several limitations have already been covered throughout the discussion of each
hypothesis and research question. A major issue that was covered is lack of power, which
was partly because of the sample size. Although the response rate was not large, the main
reason that sample size was smaller than anticipated was because the instructions were
unclear to some parents for the compliance questions. As discussed earlier, the
instructions were changed and this controlled that problem for the remainder of the
present study and will help in future investigations. Although that change will help get all
of the needed data from parents who decide to participate, other changes need to be made
to get more parents to participate overall. V

One of the major problems with recruitment was the parenting style questions
about corporal punishment. In the future, more information about conﬁdentiality should
be provided to parents so that they feel protected when answering the questions. Also, the

researcher needs to anticipate similar situations of schools being sensitive to studies that

79

seem to be measuring parental mistreatment and ﬁnd a way to assure them that parenting
style measures are not designed to identify problem parenting. This added information
about the privacy of data and the intent of the measures should also help to avoid a
restriction in range in parenting styles. Because parents were overly concerned with their
self perception to the researchers they may have given inaccurate answers about their
parenting style to appear in a way that they deﬁne as socially desirable. Beyond just
making parents comfortable, future research also needs to survey a more diverse set of
parents. Discipline strategies have been found to vary based on socio-economic
differences (Coolahan et al., 2002). In addition, children can also be asked about their
parent’s discipline strategies to get a view that is less likely to be inﬂuenced by social
desirability because they are not reporting about the self.

Accuracy was also a problem for children when they answered the compliance
questions. This was especially the case for the co-viewing compliance measure. The
discussion of the co-viewing compliance measure earlier suggests that it be re-evaluated
completely. The deﬁnition of co-viewing compliance may not adequately capture how
families establish guidelines associated with this mediation style.

Similarly, accuracy was a problem for children’s reports of temperament. The
process of interviewing suggested that the reliability problems for the temperament
questions were because children could not understand some of the statements on the
scale. The researchers who developed the scale meant for the self administered child
version of the scale to only be used with children in late elementary school through high
school (Windle & Lerner, 1986). For younger children, there is only a scale available for

a parent to ﬁll out about that child’s temperament. Therefore, these previous reliability

80

tests did not test these questions on second and third graders and certain words and
statements were harder for them to interpret. Also, other statements within the three
dimensions used for this study were identiﬁed as double barreled because they could be
interpreted differently if the subjectapplied the statement to different contexts. In fact, a
reliability analysis was conducted on children above eight years old in this study and both
the task persistence and approach/withdrawal reliability estimates did increase when only
older children were in the analysis. The task persistence estimate was equivalent to the
Windle and Lerner (1986) study if the same item was dropped (a =.70). The activin
sleep dimension still obtained the same reliability, which was also equivalent to the
Windle and Lerner (1986) study ((1 =83). Although the approach/withdrawal dimension
did get a boost in reliability with older children, it was still at an unacceptable level (a
=.57). Therefore, the same concern still holds, these questions seem to be hard to interpret
for children in general. Additionally, more temperament dimensions should be tested in
future studies. This study only used three of the nine possible dimensions of temperament
and more dimensions may result in a better estimate of goodness of ﬁt between the parent
and child. Moreover, other measurement possibilities should be considered for capturing
goodness of ﬁt in the future.

Age is also an important variable to consider beyond interpretation issues. The
literature review of the paper summarizes several investigations that document evidence
that age has an effect on the types of television guidelines parents set for their children
(i.e., St. Peters et al., 1991; Warren, 2003). And this study conﬁrms that compliance to
those guidelines also differs by age. Therefore, future studies should use age as a variable

of study and as a control variable. This would be another factor to consider when

81

increasing sample size. The study was nine 7-year-olds, seventeen 8-year-olds, ﬁfteen 9-
year-olds, twenty four 10-year-olds, twenty ﬁve 11-year-olds, and twelve 12-year-olds.
Therefore, future analyses would need to even out the sample by increasing the number
of second, third and sixth graders.

Finally, this survey was relatively long and may have resulted in fatigue,
especially for the parents. Although the order of the questions was varied, the
temperament and parenting style questions always came ﬁrst so that if a parent had a
child that did not watch the target programs on the survey they could not forget to ﬁll out
the remaining questions. This prevented possible data loss, but may have contributed to
parents deciding not to participate in the study because the survey looked so long. It
would be ideal in the future if parents could be interviewed during parent teacher
conferences or at a school event. This would present an opportunity where a more diverse
set of parents might participate, the researchers could have more control over their
completion of the survey, parents could ask qtiestions about items as they occur, and
researchers could facilitate the completion of the survey in a lively manner to help
prevent fatigue.

Future Research

In the future, researchers should consider some larger issues related to mediation
literature and the changing media environment. The ﬁrst issue is whether parents deﬁne
mediation guidelines in the same way as researchers. It is clear from the research that
mediation scholars have identiﬁed the types of mediation guidelines parents usually
implement, but it is not clear whether parents implement them using the same deﬁnitions

as media researchers. To date, the most universal guide for parents to use for evaluation

82

is the television ratings system. As media researchers are aware, these are unreliable
(Greenberg & Hnilo, 2001). They also promote greater use of restrictive guidelines, when
there needs to be more of a focus on critical strategies. Parents may avoid active
mediation strategies because they don’t know how to identify “bad” content on
television. For example, can parents deﬁne and identify violence, sex, persuasive
advertising, and negative health messages accurately? If explicit examples were provided
for parents that educate them to accurately implement these guidelines, then researchers
would have a better place to start for evaluation and change.

Moreover, are the guidelines changing? With technology advancing so fast from
year to year, children have new gadgets, communication devices, television recording
devices, and video games at their ﬁngertips. It is not realistic to think that a parent has
different guidelines for their use of each item. Just like children multi-task their use of
technology items, parents are starting to multi-task in their guidelines for how their child
should use the media use. This changes the landscape of mediation research and
introduces many questions about what the guidelines are, how they are used, how

effective they are and whether children comply with these guidelines.

83

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93

APPENDIX A

Parent Survey

If you have decided to participate in the study, we thank you for your participation.
Remember, the person who fills out this survey should be the parent/guardian who
decides on the guidelines for television in the household. That same person should
be the parent/guardian who has signed the permission form. Please be sure to read
the instructions carefully, the first 3 sets of questions ask about you and the
remainder of the survey is about your child,

First, please indicate whether you are the: (circle one)
Male: Father Stepfather Male Guardian

Female: Mother Stepmother Female Guardian

 

TEMPERAMENT: On the following pages are some statements about how
people like you may behave. Some of the statements may be true of your own
behavior and others may not apply to you. For each statement we would like
you to indicate if the statement is usually true of you, is more true than false
of you, is in the middle, is more false than true of you, or is usually false of
you. There are no "right" or "wrong" answers because all people behave in
different ways. All you have to do is answer what is true for m.

Here is an example of how to ﬁll out this survey. Suppose a statement said:
"I eat about the same things for breakfast every day."

If the statement were usually false for you, you would respond:
"A," usually FALSE.

If the statement were more false than true for you, you would respond:
"B," more FALSE than true.

If the statement were neutral, you would respond:

“C”, in the MIDDLE

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If the statement were more true than false for you, you would respond:
"D," more TRUE than false.

If the statement were usually true for you, you would respond:
"E," usually TRUE.

On the line to the left of each statement write an A if the statement is usually Es; for
you, write a _B if the statement is mtg f_al§ th_an_ Q; for you, write a Q if the statement is
in the middle for you, write 2 if the statement is m m: théan fﬁe for you, or write a E
if the statement is usually @ for you.

PLEASE KEEP THESE THREE THINGS IN MIND AS YOU ANSWER:

1. Give only answers that are true or false for you. It is best to say what you really
think.

2. Don't spend too much time thinking over each question. Give Q ﬁ_rs_t_, natural

information you might like, but give the best answer you can under the
circumstances. Some statements may seem similar to each other because they ask
about the same situation. However, each one looks at a different area of your
behavior. Therefore, your answers may be different in each case.

3. Remember, A = usually FALSE
B = more FALSE than true
C = in the MIDDLE
D = more TRUE than false
E = usually TRUE

1. _ Once I am involved in a task, nothing can distract me from it. (Task Orientation)

2. __ I persist at a task until it's ﬁnished. (Task Orientation)

3. __ I can make myself at home anywhere. (Approach/Withdrawal)

4. __ I canalways be distracted by something else, no matter what I may be doing.
(Task Orientation)

5. _I stay with an activity for a long time. (Task Orientation)
6. _I usually move towards new objects shown to me. (Approach/Withdrawal)

7. _If I am doing one thing, something else occurring won't get me to stop. (Task
Orientation)

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A = usually FALSE

B = more FALSE than true
C = in the MIDDLE

D = more TRUE than false
E = usually TRUE

8. _My ﬁrst reaction is to reject something new or unfamiliar to me.
(Approach/Withdrawal)

9. _Things going on around me can no_t take me away from what I am doing. (Task
Orientation)

10. _Once I take something up, I stay with it. (Task Orientation)
1 1. _I am hard to distract. (Task Orientation)

12. _On meeting a new person I tend to move towards him or her.
(Approach/Withdrawal)

13. _It takes me no time at all to get used to new people. (Approach/Withdrawal)
14. _I move a great deal in my sleep. (Activity-Sleep)

15. +1 move towards new situations. (Approach/Withdrawal)

16. _I move a lot in bed. (Activity-Sleep)

17. _In the morning, I am still in the same place as I was when I fell asleep. (Activity-
Sleep)

18. _I don't move around much at all in my sleep. (Activity-Sleep)

19. _My ﬁrst response to anything new is to move my head toward it.
(Approach/Withdrawal) .

 

PARENTING STYLE: Now we have a questionnaire that is designed to measure
how often you exhibit each of these behaviors with your child. Please rate how you
exhibit this behavior and place your answer on the line next to each item.

I EXHIBIT THIS BEHAVIOR:

A = Never

B = Once In Awhile

C = About Half of the Time
D = Very Often

E = Always

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19.
20.
21.

22.
23.

1 am responsive to our child’s feelings and needs. (Authoritative-Connection)
I use physical punishment as a way of disciplining our child. (Authoritarian-
Physical Coercion)
1 take our child’s desires into account before asking the child to do something.
(Authoritative-Autonomy)
When our child asks why he/she has to conform, I state: because 1 said so, or I am
your parent and I want you to. (Authoritarian-Punitive)
I explain to our child how we feel about the child’s good and bad behavior.
(Authoritative-Regulation) ‘
I spank when our child is disobedient. (Authoritarian-Physical Coercion)
I encourage our child to talk about his/her troubles. (Authoritative-Connection)
I ﬁnd it difﬁcult to discipline our child. (Permissive)
I encourage our child to freely express himself/herself even when disagreeing with
parents. (Authoritative-Autonomy)
l punish by taking privileges away ﬁ'om our child with little if any explanatioris
(Authoritarian-Punitive)
I emphasize the reasons for rules. (Authoritative-Regulation)
1 give comfort and understanding when our child is upset. (Authoritative-
Connection)
1 yell or shout when our child misbehaves. (Authoritarian-Verbal Hostility)
1 give praise when our child is good. (Authoritative-Connection)
I give into our child when the child causes a commotion about something.
(Permissive)
l explode in anger towards our child. (Authoritarian-Verbal Hostility)
l threaten our child with punishment more often than actually giving it.
(Permissive)
I take into account our child’s preferences in making plans for the family.
(Authoritative-Autonomy)
I grab our child when being disobedient. (Authoritarian-Physical Coercion)
I state punishments to our child and does not actually do them. (Permissive)
1 show respect for our child’s opinions by encouraging our child to express them.
(Authoritative-Autonomy)
1 allow our child to give input into family rules. (Authoritative-Autonomy)

l scold and criticize to make our child improve. (Authoritarian-Verbal Hostility)

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24. l spoil our child. (Permissive)

25.__ I give our child reasons why rules should be obeyed. (Authoritative-Regulation)
26.__ I use threats as punishment with little or no justiﬁcation. (Authoritarian-Punitive)
27.__ l have warm and intimate times together with our child. (Authoritative-Connection)
28._ l punish by putting our child off somewhere alone with little if any explanations.

(Authoritarian-Punitive)

29.__ 1 help our child to understand the impact of behavior by encouraging our child to
talk about the consequences of his/her own actions. (Authoritative-
Regulation)

30._ l scold or criticize when our child’s behavior doesn’t meet our expectations.

(Authoritarian-Verbal Hostility)
31. I explain the consequences of the child’s behavior. (Authoritative-Regulation)

32. I slap our child when the child misbehaves. (Authoritarian-Physical Coercion)

DEMOGRAPHICS: Now we would like you to answer a few more questions about
yourself.

1. What gender are you? (giLle one)
Female Male
2. What is your age? __
3. How many siblings does your child have?
a. What number was your child __ in the birth order? _
4. What is your household annual income (this includes both spouse salaries or any salary

that contributes to the household expenses)?

 

5. How many people live in your household, including you?

6. What is your occupation?

 

 

98

PROBLEMACTIC CONTENT: Now; we would like you’to answer a few questions
about television. When you answer these questions ONLY think about ,
the child that brought this survey home from school.

 

1. Does your child, watch any of the following TV programs?

-Kim Possible

-W.I.T.C.H.

-Darcy’s Wild Life

-Bratz

-Winx Club

-Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

-G.I. Joe Sigma Six

-Power Rangers

-Ed, Edd n Eddy

-Spider-Man and his Amazing
Friends

-Grim Adventures of Billy and
Mandy

-Catscatch

-Spongebob Squarepants

-Fairly Odd Parents

-Cartoon Cartoon Show

Please circle one.
Yes No

If you answered NO to this question, you can STOP the survey now and return it to the
child’s classroom.

 

99

RESTRICTIVE MEDIATION: The following questions are also about television.
When you answer these questions only think about the kinds of programs listed
above and about your child, . Use the following options to answer the
question and place your answer on the line next to each item.

A = Never
B = Once In Awhile
C = About Half of the Time
D = Very Often
E = Always
1. Do you have guidelines in place about the times of day that your child can

watch these types of television programs?

2. _Do you have guidelines in place about how much of this type of television
your child can watch (for example, hours or minutes per day, hours or minutes per
week)?

3. _Do you have guidelines in place about what television stations your child
can and cannot watch?

4. _____Do you restrict your child to only watching television shows that have a speciﬁc
TV rating (like TVPG or TV14, etc.) ?

5. _Do you restrict your child from watching some of these television
programs?

RESTRICTIVE COMPLIANCE:

6. ___Does your child follow these guidelines/restrictions at home?

7. _Does your child follow these guidelines/restrictions when they are not with

you?

 

100

ACTIVE MEDIATION: Here are just a few more questions about television. Use
the following options to answer the question and place your answer on the line next
to each item.

A = Never

B = Once In Awhile

C = About Half of the Time
D = Very Often

E = Always

For the TV shows we mentioned earlier, how often do you...
1._Explain why some things actors do are good.
2.__Tell your child that you like the show.

3.__Explain why some things actors do are bad.

4._Tell your child that something on TV isn’t really so.
5._____Explain the motives of TV characters.

6.

Explain what something on TV really means.

ACTIVE COMPLIANCE: Does your child...

7. _accept your evaluations of the show’s content?

8. _understand your evaluations of the show’s content?

9. ____remember your evaluations of the show’s content when you are
at home?

l0. _remember your evaluations of the show’ 3 content when they are

not with you?

 

101

INTENT IONAL CO-VIEWING: Here are just a few more questions about
television. Use the following options to answer the question and place your answer
on the line next to each item.

A = Never

B = Once In Awhile

C = About Half of the Time
D = Very Oﬁen

E = Always

For the TV shows we mentioned earlier, how often do you...

1. Watch the show together for the beneﬁt of the child

2.__Watch the show together to monitor the content your child is viewing

3._Watch the show together so that you can intervene program messages when
necessary

4._____Watch the show together because it’s important to watch it together

COVIEWING COMPLIANCE: Does your child...

respond positively to you watching TV with them?

5.
6. respond negatively to you watching TV with them?
7. seek you out at home to watch TV with them?

8.

seek out other adults to watch TV with them when they are not with you?

 

PASSIVE CO-VIEWING: Finally, here are just a few last questions about
television. Use the following options to answer the question and place your answer
on the line next to each item.

A = Never

B = Once In Awhile

C = About Half of the Time
D = Very Often

E = Always

For the TV shows we mentioned earlier, how often do you...

1. Watch the show together because you both like the program.

2. Watch the show together because of a common interest in the program.
3. Watch the show together just for fun.

4.

Watch the show together because they are yours and your child’s favorite.

102

APPENDIX B

Child Interview

Parental Guardian who ﬁlled out survey was (circle one):
Male: Father Stepfather Male Guardian
Female: Mother Stepmother Female Guardian
TEMPERAMENT: HOW TO ANSWER:
On the following pages are some sentences. They are about how children like you may
behave. Some of the sentences may be true of how you behave and others may not be true
for you. For each sentence we would like you to say if the sentence is usually true for
you, is more true than false for you, is in the middle, is more false than true for you, or is
usually false for you. There are no "ri t" or "wrong" answers? because all children
behave in different ways. All you have to do is answer what is true for you.
(PROVIDE CHILD WITH A RESPONSE FORM)
Here is an example. Suppose a sentence said:

"I eat the same things for breakfast every day."
If the sentence were usually false for you, you would point to:

"A," usually FALSE.
If the sentence were more false than true for you, you would point to:

"B," more FALSE than true.
If the sentence were in the middle for you, you would point to:

“C”, in the MIDDLE
If the sentence were more true than false for you, you would point to:

"D," more TRUE than false.

If the sentence were usually true for you, you would point to:

","E usually TRUE.

103

 

 

PLEASE REMEMBER THESE THREE THINGS AS YOU ANSWER:

1. Give only answers that really tell about you. It is best to say what you really
think.
2 Don't spend too much time thinking over each question. Give the m answer g

i_t comes t_o m. Of course, the sentences are too short to say everything you
might like. But give the best answer you can. Some sentences may seem just like
others because they are about the same things. But, each sentence asks about a
different part of the way you behave. Therefore, your answers may be different.

3. Remember, A = usually FALSE
B = more FALSE than true
C = in the MIDDLE
D = more TRUE than false
E = usually TRUE

Italics for SECOND and THIRD graders and for QUESTIONS!

1. _ Once I am involved in a task, nothing can distract me from it. (Task Orientation)
Once I am involved in something, nothing can take me away ﬁom it.

2. _ I persist at a task until it's ﬁnished. (Task Orientation)
I continue something until it ’s ﬁnished

3. _ I can make myself at home anywhere. (Approach/Withdrawal)
4. __ I can always be distracted by something else, no matter what I may be doing.

(Task Orientation)
I can always be interrupted by something else, no matter what I may be doing.

- if.

5. _I stay with an activity for a long time. (Task Orientation)

6. _I usually move towards new objects shown to me. (Approach/Withdrawal)

 

7. _If I am doing one thing, something else occurring won't get me to stop. (Task a
Orientation) happening E .
8. _My ﬁrst reaction is to reject something new or unfamiliar to me.
(Approach/Withdrawal) dislike

9. _Things going on around me can _r;o_t take me away from what I am doing. (Task
Orientation)

10. _Once I take something up, I stay with it. (Task Orientation)

104

A = usually FALSE

B = more FALSE than true
C = in the MIDDLE

D = more TRUE than false
E = usually TRUE

11. ____I am hard to distract. (Task Orientation)
I am hard to interrupt.

12. _On meeting a new person I tend to move towards him or her.
(Approach/Withdrawal)

13. _It takes me no time at all to get used to new people. (Approach/Withdrawal)

14. __I move a great deal in my sleep. (Activity-Sleep)
a lot

15. _I move towards new situations. (Approach/Withdrawal)
16. ‘_I' move a lot in bed. (Activity-Sleep)

17. _In the morning, I am still in the same place as I was when I fell asleep. (Activity-
Sleep)

18. __I don't move around much at all in my sleep. (Activity—Sleep)

19. _My ﬁrst response to anything new is to move my head toward it.
(Approach/Withdrawal)

(PUT RESPONSE FORM AWAY)
DEMOGRAPHICS: Now we want to ask you a few more questions about yourself.
1. Gender of the child. (c_ir£l_§ one)
Female Male

2. How old are you?
3. How many brothers and sisters do you have?

(if only 1, ask if older or younger)

a. How many are older than you?

b. How many are younger than you?

105

PROBLEMATIC CONTENT:~Now, we would like you to answer a few questions
about television.

1. Do you watch any of these TV programs? ( “Yes” or “No” for each show)

«Depending on the gender of the child, ﬁrst go through their gender list, then the
mixed list, then the opposite gender list.

GIRL

-Kim Possible
-W.I.T.C.H.
-Darcy’s Wild Life
-Bratz

-Winx Club

EQX

—Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

-G.I. Joe Sigma Six .

-Power Rangers

-Ed, Edd n Eddy

-Spider-Man and his Amazing
Friends

 

MIXED

-Grim Adventures of Billy and
Mandy

-Catscratch

-Spongebob Squarepants

-Fairly Odd Parents

-Cartoon Cartoon Show

Please circle the child’s answer.

Yes No

If the child answered NO to this question, you can STOP the survey now.

 

106

The following questions are also about television. You can answer these ﬁve ways.
(GIVE CHILD RESPONSE CARD)
For example, if I asked:
“Do you like hot fudge on an ice cream sundae?”
If your answer is NEVER, you would point to:
"A," NEVER.
If your answer is ONCE IN AWHILE, you would point to:
"B," ONCE IN AWHILE.
If your answer is ABOUT HALF OF THE TIME, you would point to:
“C”, ABOUT HALF OF THE TIME.
If your answer is VERY OFTEN, you would point to:
"D," VERY OFTEN.
If your answer is ALWAYS, you would point to:
"E," ALWAYS.

When you answer these questions only think about the kinds of TV shows we just talked

about. Remember, this is not a test. There are no “right” or “wrong” answers. Are you
ready?

107

 

RESTRICTIVE MEDIATION:

A = Never
B = Once In Awhile
C = About Half of the Time
D = Very Often
E = Always
1. Does your have rules about what times during the day you can

watch these television shows?

2. Does your have rules about how many hours or rrrinutes each day or

week you can watch these television shows?

3. _Does your only let you watch some of these TV shows?

4. _Does your __ have rules about what television stations you can and
cannot watch?

5. _Does your only let you watch television shows that have certain TV

ratings (like TVPG or TV14, etc.)?
Parent TV Ratings are attached at the end of the survey.
RESTRICTIVE COMPLIANCE: If the child answered B, C, D or E on any of the
previous ﬁve questions, please have them answer these two additional questions.
6. _Do you follow your __’s rules about these kinds of TV programs when
you are at home?
7. _Do you follow your __’s rules about these kinds of TV programs when

you are not with your ?

108

ACTIVE MEDIATION: Here are just a few more questions about television.
Remember to use the card to answer the question. Remember, point to A if your answer
is...

A = Never

B = Once In Awhile

C = About Half of the Time
D = Very Often

E = Always

When watching the TV shows we talked about earlier,

1._how much does your _, explain why some things TV characters do are
good.

2._how much does your _, tell you that they like the show.

3.__how much does your _, explain why some things TV characters do are
bad.

4._how much does your _, tell you that something on TV isn’t really so.

isn’t real, doesn ’t usually happen
5. how much does your , explain why TV characters do the things they do.
6. how much does your , explain what something on TV really means.

ACTIVE COMPLIANCE: If the child answered B, C, D or E on any of the previous
six questions, have them answer these four additional questions.

7.____Do you accept what your __ tells you about these shows?

8.___Do you understand what your __ tells you about these shows?

9.__Do you remember what your _ tells you about these shows when you are at
home?

lO.___Do you remember what your _ tells you about these shows when you are
not with your _?

109

 

 

PASSIVE CO-VIEWING: Here are just a few more questions about television.
Remember to use the card to answer the question.

A = Never

B = Once In Awhile

C = About Half of the Time
D = Very Often

E = Always

When watching the TV shows we talked about earlier,

l.__how oﬁen does your _, watch these TV shows with you? F
2._how often does your , watch these shows with you because you both like I
the program.

3._how~often does your , watch these shows with you because you both like

something speciﬁc in the program.
4. how oﬁen does your

5. how often does your

 

, watch these shows with you just for fun.

, watch these shows with you because they are

yours and your ’5 favorite.

CO-VIEWING COMPLIANCE: If the child answered B, C, D or E on any of the
previous five questions then please ask the next four questions below.
6. Do you like it when your watches these TV shows with you?

7. Do you try to ﬁnd your to watch TV with when you are at home?

8. Do you try to ﬁnd other adults to watch TV with you when you are not with your

?

Thank you. We are all done.

PUT AWAY RESPONSE FORM

110

 

Response Form

A = usually FALSE

B = more FALSE than true

C = in the MIDDLE

D = more TRUE than false

E = usually TRUE

111

Response Form

A = Never

B = Once in Awhile

C = About Half of the Time

D = Very Often

 

E = Always

112

 

if?

<

3<
‘\l

o:

1‘

 

2i

><

Parental TV Ratings

All Children

This program is designed to be appropriate for all children. Whether animated or live-action. the
themes and elements in this program are speciﬁcally designed for a very young audience.
including children from ages 2 - 6. This program is not expected to frighten younger children.

Directed to Older Children

This program is designed for children age 7 and above. It may be more appropriate for children
who have acquired the developmental skills needed to distinguish between make-believe and
reality. Themes and elements in this program may include mild fantasy violence or comedic
violence, or may frighten children under the age of 7. Therefore. parents may wish to consider the
suitability of this program for their very young children.

Directed to Older Children - Fantasy Violence
For those programs where fantasy violence may be more intense or more combative than other
programs in this category. such programs will be designated TV-Y7-FV.

General Audience

Most parents would ﬁnd this program suitable for all ages. Although this rating does not signify a
program designed speciﬁcally for children. most parents may let younger children watch this
program unattended. It contains little or no violence. no strong language and little or no sexual
dialogue or situations.

e,"

Parental Guidance Suggested

This program contains material that parents may find unsuitable for younger children. Many
parents may want to watch it with their younger children. The theme itself may call for parental
guidance and/or the program contains one or more of the following: moderate violence (V), some
sexual situations (8). infrequent coarse language (L). or some suggestive dialogue (D).

Parents Strongly Cautioned

This program contains some material that many parents would ﬁnd unsuitable for children under
14 years of age. Parents are strongly urged to exercise greater care in monitoring this program
and are cautioned against letting children under the age of 14 watch unattended. This program
contains one or more of the following: intense violence (V). intense sexual situations (8). strong
coarse language (L). or intensely suggestive dialogue (D).

Mature Audience Only

This program is speciﬁcally designed to be viewed by adults and therefore may be unsuitable for
children under 17. This program contains one or more of the following: graphic violence (V).
explicit sexual activity (S), or crude indecent language (L).

113

 

 

FOOTNOTES

' This exact correlation was double checked and conﬁrmed to be the accurate
correlation between these parenting styles and child compliance to active mediation.

2 This exact correlation was double checked as well and conﬁrmed to be the
accurate correlation between these parenting styles and compliance to co-viewing

mediation.

114

 

 

 

 

Zero—Order Correlations

TABLE 2

 

 

 

Variable l 2 3

 

Parenting Styles
1. Authoritative

2. Authoritarian —.37**

3. Permissive —.05 .17
Temperament

4. Task Orient Parent .18 —.09 —.ll

5. Task Orient Child .02 —.11 .02

6. Activity S Parent .14 —.05 21*
7. Activity S Child .09 —.04 -.09
8. Appr/Withd Parent .16 —.23* -.27**
9. Appr/Withd Child .17 -.20* —.18
10. Goodness of Fit —.05 —.05 .03
Mediation Style

11. Restrict Parent .16 —.24* —.36**
12. Restrict Child .17 —.19 —.15
13. Active Parent .34** —.15 .09
14. Active Child .19 .04 .05
15. Passive Parent .10 .04 .30**
16. Passive Child .03 .09 .09
17. Intention Parent .18 -.15 —.01
Child Compliance

l8. Restrict Parent —.03 —.ll —.3l**
19. Restrict Child .10 .02 —.20*
20. Active Parent .21 —.27** —.27*
21. Active Child —.08 —.04 -.16
22. Co—view Parent .32** —.l4 -.14
23. C0~view Child .04 —.003 .07

Note. Please note sample size differences by variable.

 

 

 

 

9 10 11 l2 l3 14 15 16 17
—.05
—.19 —.04
.ll -.13 .11
.17 .19 —.02 .04
.03 .01 .10 .000 .02
.08 .04 —.08 —.07 .15 ~03
.12 .14 —.11 .004 .22* .14 .02
—.04 .16 —.09 —.06 .05 .13 —.08 .46**
.04 .04 .12 .04 —.07 —.04 .13 .25* .'.l
—.05 .08 —.004 .07 —. I4 .02 -.09 .14 .46** .20
.10 —.01 .08 —.17 —.08 —.I8 .02 .03 —.04 .49** .23*
—.04 .08 -.05 .03 —16 .10 —.21* .01 .34** .09 .65** .30**
.15 .04 .04 .05 —10 —'.02 .08 .33** 23* .62** .22* .56** .24*
.003 —.07 .04 -.11 .06 .17 .06 27* -.04 —.15 —.22 —.25 —.10 —.001
.05 .16 -.07 -.02 .17 .03 .10 .15 22* .04 .10 .03 .17 .05
.07 .04 —.21 —.06 .20 .01 .18 .21 —.02 .08 —.21 —.I2 —.28* .04
.04 .14 —.29** —.13 .07 .004 -.01 .21 .24* .08 .15 .07 .22 .16
.02 .15 .24* -.ll .31** ~09 .46** .11 -.001 .09 —.02 .07 —.19 .20
—.01 .07 —.07 .01 -.01 .18 .02 —.10 .04 .03 36*"< .26* .41** .15

 

 

 

*p < .05, two~tailed. **p < .01, two—tailed.

 

22 23

__P_______________._._——————4——————___

Variable 19 20 21
19. Restrict Child

20. Active Parent .22

21. Active Child .49** .06

22. Co—view Parent .11 28* —.25*
23. Co—view Child .20 —.19 .32**

116

-.02

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

TABLE 1

Means, Standard Deviations, Sample Size, Ranges, and Reliabilities for Study Variables

 

 

 

 

 

 

Variable M SD N Range (1
Parenting Stvles

1. Authoritative 4.14 0.44 102 2.67 — 4.87 .81
2. Authoritarian 1.66 0.35 102 1.08 — 2.73 .69
3. Permissive 2.02 0.57 102 1.20 — 3.80 .67
Temperament

4. Task Orient Parent 3.27 0.77 102 1.67 — 5.00 .81
5. Task Orient Child 3.28 0.71 102 1.67 - 5.00 .61
6. Activity S Parent 3.21 1.32 101 1.00 — 5.00 .91
7. Activity 8 Child 3.30 1.19 102 1.00 — 5.00 .83
8. Appr/Withd Parent 3.29 0.70 102 1.00 — 5.00 .68
9. Appr/Withd Child 3.45 0.62 102 1.83 - 5.00 .46
10. Goodness ofFit 2.25 1.15 102 0.17 — 5.58
Mediation Style

11. Restrict Parent 3.46 1.14 91 1.00 — 5.00 .85
12. Restrict Child 2.90 1.00 98 1.00 - 5.00 .69
13. Active Parent 3.11 0.90 89 1.50 — 4.67 .88
14. Active Child 2.73 0.98 98 1.00 - 4.83 .85
15. Passive Parent 2.51 0.96 89 1.00 — 5.00 .89
16. Passive Child 2.57 1.05 98 1.00 — 5.00 .85
17. Intention Parent 2.62 0.88 90 1.00 — 5.00 .87
Child Complignie

18. Restrict Parent 4.04 0.88 ‘ 56 1.00 — 5.00 .80
19. Restrict Child 4.46 0.78 96 1.50 - 5.00 .73
20. Active Parent 3.64 0.74 69 1.50 - 5.00 .85
21. Active Child 4.09 0.79 96 1.75 — 5.00 .72
22. Co-view Parent 2.98 0.73 75 1.33 —- 4.33 .61
23. Co-view Child 2.80 0.83 90 1.33 — 5.00 .50

 

Note. Please note sample size differences by variable.

 

115

TABLE 3

Mean Diﬂerences of Child Compliance for each Mediation Style

 

 

 

Test Child Compliance M SD t df d
Parent Remrts

l Restrictive 4.09 0.81 3.72" 49 0.53
Active 3.62 0.78

2 Restrictive 4.10 0.69 8.99”“ * 50 1.26
Co-view 2.85 0.70

3 Active 3.61 0.76 6.00“ 62 0.76
Co-view 2.94 0.72
Child Reports

1 Restrictive 4.45 0.78 4.57" 93 0.47
Active 4.07 0.79

2 Restrictive 4.49 0.73 15.98“ * 87 1 .70
Co-view 2.80 0.83

3 Active 4.12 0.76 13.67** i 88 1.45
Co-view 2.78 0.82

 

 

Note. Paired samples t-tests were used to test the mean difference of child compliance for each mediation

style for reports from parents and reports from children. * p < .05. "p < .01.

117

TABLE 4

Attenuated Correlations between Parenting Styles and Child Compliance to Parental
Mediation

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Parenting Styles
Child Compliance Authoritative Authoritarian Permissive
Restrictive Compligg r
Restrictive-Parent (n = 56) -.04 -. 15 -.42** :
Restrictive-Child (n = 96) .13 .03 -.29**
Active Complm
Active-Parent (n = 69) .25* -.36** -.36** ”i
Active-Child (n = 96) -.10 -.06 -.23*
Co-viewing Compliance
Co—view-Parent (n = 75) .46" -.22* -.22*
Co-view-Child (n = 90) .06 -.01 .12
Overall Complm
Overall-Parent (n = 83) .19 -.25** -.49**
Overall-Child (n = 98) .03 -.04 -.24**
Mean 4.14 1.66 2.02
SD 0.44 0.35 0.57

 

Note. All correlations are corrected for attenuation so that the correlation represents what the correlation

would be if the measurement of the variables was perfect. l"p < .05, two-tailed. “p < .01, two-tailed.

118

TABLE 5

Dijferences in Parent and Child Reports of Parental Mediation Style and Child
Compliance to Mediation

 

 

 

 

Absolute Mean

_Value Difference M SD t df d

Meﬁtion Style

Differences

Restrictive 1.01 0.70 13.63* * 89 1.44
5 Active 0.93 0.81 10.80" 87 1.15

Passive 0.88 0.78 10.62" 87 1.13

Child Compliaﬂg

Differences

Restrictive 0.79 0.78 7.41 ** 53 1.01

Active 0.95 0.68 1 1.28" 65 1.39

Co-view 0.85 0.66 ' 10.70“ 67 1.30

Overall 0.70 0.56 11.36" 81 1.25

 

Note. One sample t-tests were run on each absolute mean value difference to determine whether the mean

differences were signiﬁcantly different from zero. " p < .05. "p < .01.

 

119

TABLE 6

Diﬂerences across Mediation Style of Parent and Child Reports on Parental Mediation
Style and Child Compliance to Mediation

 

 

 

Test Difference Variable M SD t df d
Mediation Style
Differences

1 Restrictive 1 .00 0.71 0.69 87 0.07
Active 0.93 0.81

2 Restrictive 1.00 0.71 1.09 87 0.01
Passive 0.88 0.78 _

3 Active 0.93 0.81 I 0.51 87 0.05
Passive _ 0.88 0.78
Child Compliance
Differences

1 Restrictive 0.78 0.76 -1.97 45 0.29
Active 1 .04 0.74

2 Restrictive 0.74 0.73 -0.50 43 0.08
Co-view 0.81 0.64

3 Active 0.91 0.69 0.74 56 0.10
Co-v’iew 0.82 0.64

 

 

Note. Paired sample t-tests were used to analyze whether differences in the reports from parents and

children occur more often for certain mediation styles. * p < .05. "p < .01.

120

TABLE 7

Mean Diﬁrerences between Parent and Child Reports on each type of Parental Mediation
Style and Child Compliance to each Mediation Style

 

 

 

 

Test M SD t df d
Medﬁtion Style

1 Restrictive Parent 3.45 1.13 4.52** 89 0.48
Restrictive Child 2.92 1.01

2 Active Parent 3.12 0.90 2.65* 87 0.28
Active Child 2.79 0.98

3 Passive Parent 2.52 0.95 -0.54 87 0.06
Passive Child 2.59 1.03
Child Complia_np§

1 Restrictive Parent 4.06 0.86 -1.96 53 0.27
Restrictive Child 4.34 0.83

2 Active Parent 3.60 0.73 -3.78** 65 0.46
Active Child 4.09 0.82

3 Co-view Parent 3.01 0.73 2.59““ 67 0.31
Co-view Child 2.69 0.71

4 Overall Parent 3.49 0.66 -2.92** 81 0.32
Overall Child 3.77 0.59

 

Note. Paired sample t-tests were used to analyze whether each type of parental mediation style and child
compliance to each mediation style were different depending on whether the parent or child made the

report. " p < .05. I""‘p < .01.

121

TABLE 8

Regression Analyses with Parenting Style and Mediation Style Regressed on Child
Compliance to Mediation

 

Restrictive Active Co-view
Compliance Compliance Compliance
Independent
Test Variables B n R2 B n R2 B n R2

 

 

 

 

Parent Authoritarian .002 56 .07

Restrictive .268
Mediation

Child Authoritarian .064 96 .05

Restrictive .228“
Mediation

Parent Authoritative .199 69 .04
Active Mediation .029

Child Authoritative -.106 96 .03
Active Mediation .166

Parent Permissive -.168 75 .03
Passive Co-viewing .117

Child Permissive .055 90 .17“

Passive Co-viewing .403”

 

Note. Six separate simple simultaneous linear regression analyses are presented in the above table. For each
type of child compliance there are two regression analyses, one for the parent reports and one of the child

reports. ‘p < .05, two-tailed. Mp < .01, two-tailed.

122

TABLE 9

Regression Analyses with Parenting Style and Intentional Co-viewing Regressed on Co-
viewing Child Compliance

 

 

 

 

Parent Co-view Child Co-view
Compliance Compliance
Independent
Variables B n R" B n R2
Authoritarian -.132 75 .06 .049 83 .03
Intentional .200 .159
Co-viewing
Authoritative .322" 75 .14" -.032 83 .02
Intentional .208 . 1 56
Co-viewing

 

Note. Four separate simple simultaneous linear regression analyses are presented in the above table.

*p < .05, two-tailed. “p < .01, two-tailed.

123

   

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