Kids and TV Commercials: A Post Research Apprasal
My paper was written about the effects that television ads have on children. It wasn’t an incredibly in-depth
paper, but I think I got to the heart to a number of issues surrounding this subject. For the most part this is an untapped field in the communication world. There have been studies done but not with the same quantity of other fields of study. The type of research I did for this project could be painted a number of different colors, but if I had to be precise, I would say it was explanatory. I was on a quest to find out why these television ads had effects on children, how they saw the world in general and also how they viewed their own personal world. In my research I came across a lot of quantitative research where the authors were just spitting a bunch of numbers at me. It did prove somewhat beneficial but it wasn’t quite as helpful as the qualitative research I came across. The qualitative helped me get into the heads of the children and gave me more of a “why” these things were going on. The numbers just showed me what happen
In my paper, I feel that I actually did answer my research questions. I was very fortunate that I uncovered a few studies that helped me right along my way and helped me create some theories of my own. If I were to go and start testing these theories that I had I would do a number of experiments that I would think would work to prove them. I could do an experiment where I would show a group of children a number of commercials about a special toy and then give two or three of them that toy. Then I would let them play together for a little bit. After that I would isolate them and let them play alone. After each phase I would ask them a number of standardized questions one on one and collect their answers. In another experiment I would show them commercials depicting certain minorities in a certain way, then I would give them a picture of one of the minorities and ask them to write a story about them to see what kind of view they have of them.
