CHICAGO – Minority youth spend more than half their day consuming media content, a rate that’s 4.5 hours greater than their White counterparts, according to a Northwestern University report released Wednesday.
Television remains king among all youth, but, among minorities who spend 13 hours per day consuming media of various types, electronic gadgets such as cell phones and iPods increasingly are the way such content gets delivered, the report found.
“Children, Media and Race: Media Use Among White, Black, Hispanic and Asian American Children” was touted by researchers as the first national study to focus exclusively on children’s media use by race and ethnicity.
Minority youth media consumption rates outpace their White counterparts by two hours when it comes to TV and video viewership, approximately an hour for music, up to 1.5 hours for computer use, and 30 to 40 minutes for playing video games.
“In the past decade, the gap between minority and White youth’s daily media use has doubled for Blacks and quadrupled for Hispanics,” said Northwestern Professor Ellen Wartella, who co-authored the study along with former Kaiser Family Foundation vice president Vicky Rideout and Northwestern post-doctoral fellow Alexis Lauri.
Wartella acknowledged that technology is a structural part of modern society but said the numbers suggest that young people are settling for a sedentary lifestyle and risk further exacerbating ongoing problems such as child obesity. She said increased parental involvement, including limiting usage time and monitoring content, could mitigate those concerns.
“Our study is not meant to blame parents,” Wartella said, adding that in some cases minority youth are using media to bridge the gap between themselves and a predominantly White culture. “But it suggests that kids are very much tethered to technology at all times. To be tethered so much by technology seems to be an imbalance … as a parent of two boys, I know it’s a wake-up call for me: All things in moderation.”
