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Injury-Related Messages in Children's Programs

Flaura Koplin Winston, MD, PhD; Kimberly Duyck Woolf, MA; Amy Jordan, PhD; Esha Bhatia, MA

Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med. 2000;154:366-369.

Objective  To characterize children's television programs in terms of their unintentional injury-related messages.

Design  Content analysis. Episodes representing a total of 216 unique television programs were coded for the presence of imitable unsafe behaviors without consequences.

Setting  A census of all children's programming airing in a northeastern city during the first week of December 1996.

Results  Exactly 47.0% of children's programming depicted at least 1 instance of unsafe, imitable behavior without consequences; one third had more than 3 instances. Exactly 51.0% of the programs targeted to school-age children and 33.4% of the programs targeted to preschoolers contained these unsafe behaviors. The majority (56.8%) of children's programs on basic cable television depicted unsafe behavior as compared with 23.1% of programs shown on public television. Cartoon programs depicted the most unsafe behaviors (60.3%), as compared with live-action programs (33.4%) and other genres (23.3%).

Conclusions  Children's television programs depict too many unsafe behaviors without consequences. Future work should explore the role of these programs in the development of unsafe behaviors in children.

From the Department of Pediatrics, The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, Philadelphia (Dr Winston); the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania (Ms Duyck Woolf and Dr Jordan); and TraumaLink at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (Ms Bhatia).

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