Electronic media have long been cited as the source of various societal ills, including the breakdown of family communication, increasing social isolation, increasing insensitivity to violence, and even acts of murder. With the recent explosion in availability of interactive media such as the Internet and the World Wide Web, concern about the impact of media use on children's well-being has reached new heights. Despite this concern, the ways in which media use fits into the larger pattern of factors influencing children's well-being remains largely unexamined. The proposed project will examine the role of electronic media use in children's well-being (academic achievement and social adjustment) in two waves of data, four years apart, from a large nationally representative data base of some 3500 families with children ages 1 to 16. We propose to examine both secular change in children's media use in different age cohorts of children, as well as the developmental role of electronic media use in children's well-being. The data come from the Child Development Supplement of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID-CDS), a sub-component of the larger PSID core sample survey conducted since 1968. The survey data is comprised of two waves, one with a panel component of roughly 2900 children who were between the ages of I and 12 in 1997 and will be between the ages of 5 and 16 in 2001, as well as a newly added cohort of children born between the 1997 and 2001 waves of data collection. The proposed project builds on a previous project analyzing relations between children's media use and well-being in the 1997 wave of data. Both waves of the PSID-CDS data include multiple measures of children's academic achievement, including standardized tests of academic achievement in reading, vocabulary, and mathematical skills. Parents and teachers reported on various aspects of children's social adjustment, including problem behaviors and social competency. This project will focus on children's use of electronic media (television, electronic games, computer software, and the Internet) reported in time use diaries collected at both waves. The analysis of this massive data base will take two years, with one year devoted to developing coding systems for categories and content of use of the Internet and the World Wide Web.
