The overall purpose of the proposed research is to examine the effects of television viewing on children's knowledge, beliefs, and processing of injury-relevant situations. Since children spend several hours per day with television, it seems likely that frequent portrayals of characters engaged in dangerous and high risk behavior will influence young viewers' beliefs about the causes and outcomes of such behavior in others as well as themselves. Knowledge of antecedent events and predictions of hte outcomes of risk situations may be an important mechanism in children's injurious behavior. Television may be a significant source of such knowledge, and thus may represent a pervasive envronmental influence on the incidence of children's injurie.s The present proposal is to study characteristics of the television medium itself as well as its influence on children's judgments about injury situations. Four studies are proposed over two years to investigate: (1) the incidence of accidental injuries portrayed in children's television programming, as well as the antecedents and consequences of those events; (2) the short-term effects of exposure to injury-relevant television content on children's judgments of risk and self-perceptions of ability; (3) children's cognitive processing of injury-relevant television content, with examination of the role of attentional and memory processes as well as individual differences in injury history; and (4) long term effects of television viewing patterns and preferences on children's knowledge """"""""scripts"""""""" for common high risk situations. Age, television viewing history, and injury history will be examined in studies 2, 3 and 4. The results will be important for both basic and applied knowledge about children's judgments of risk and injury, and will have implications for policy decisions for production of safety promotion in children's television programming.
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