engleski

Prosocial Behavior in Relation to Time Spent Watching Television and Reading Books

Despite extensive research on early child development, some aspect are still in need of further clarification. More research is needed, for example, on how young children’s inclusion in the social world is related to their engagement with different types of media sources ; such as watching television and reading books with their parents. So far, research had documented media effects on prosocial behavior which is shaped, among other things, by children’s prosocial skills, (Wiegman, Kuttschreuter & Baarda, 1992). Other research shows that reading fiction is associated with increased social ability in adults (Mar, Oatley, Hirsh, dela Paz & Peterson, 2006) and that reading fiction leads to better performance on tests of affective and cognitive ability in children (Kidd & Castano, 2013). However, we feel there is a need for further research in this area. The aim of our research was to investigate the relation of prosocial behavior and the time children spent watching television on their own or with parents and reading books with their parents. We predicted that there would be a positive relation between reading time and time spent in watching television with parent and prosocial behavior and a negative one between time spent watching television on their own and prosocial behavior. We followed the activities of 96 typically developing Croatian children ages 17 to 39 months (51 male and 45 female) to answer the research questions. The children’s parents provided information about the average time children spent watching television in general and the average time children spent watching television and reading books with parents during a typical day. Parents also completed a questionnaire regarding their children’s prosocial behavior. Our results showed a significant positive correlation between reported prosocial behavior and time children spen watching television in general (r=.208*, p<.05) but not between prosocial behavior and time spent in joint television watching(r=.154, p>.05) or the time children spent reading books with their parents (r=.067, p>.05). This meant that the more time children spent watching television in general, the more their parents reported prosocial behavior. Since the age span of children included in the study was fairly wide, we conducted further correlations of our variables with age and found a significant positive correlation between age and prosocial behavior (r=.236*, p<.05) as well as between age and time children spent watching television in general (r=.265**, p<.01). When we applied partial correlation analyses between the time children spent watching television and prosocial behavior, the results showed that, after controlling the effect of age, the remaining correlation was not significant (r=.156, p>.05). We therefore concluded that there were no significant correlations found between prosocial behavior and time children spent watching television on their own or with their parents or reading books with their parents. Our results were just a starting point in a larger investigation of children’s habits of engagement with different types of digital devices, and for different purposes, as well as their reading habits and the effect of these habits on their social skills, including prosocial behavior, and are discussed in this manner.

prosocial behavior; television; reading

nije evidentirano