Search Results
Title: Is the 'Idiot's Box' Raising Idiocy? Early and Middle Childhood Television Watching and Child Cognitive Outcome
Resulting in 1 citation.
| 1. |
Munasib, Abdul Bhattacharya, Samrat |
|
Is the 'Idiot's Box' Raising Idiocy? Early and Middle Childhood Television Watching and Child Cognitive Outcome Economics of Education Review 29,5 (October 2010): 873-883. Also: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272775710000300 Cohort(s): Children of the NLSY79 Publisher: Elsevier Keyword(s): Body Mass Index (BMI); Geographical Variation; Mothers, Behavior; Obesity; Parent Supervision/Monitoring; Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT- Math); Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT- Reading); Regions; Television Viewing; Variables, Instrumental; Weight There is widespread belief that exposure to television has harmful effects on children's cognitive development. Most studies that point to a negative correlation between hours of television watching and cognitive outcomes, fail to establish causality. Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) we study young children between 5 and 10 years of age during late 1990s and early 2000s. We find strong evidence of negative correlations between hours of television watched and cognitive test scores. However, once parent's characteristics and unobserved child characteristics are taken into account these correlations go away. We find that hours of television viewed per se do not have any measurable impact on children's test scores. Our results are robust to different model specifications and instrumental variable estimates. We conclude that despite the conventional wisdom and the ongoing populist movement, proactive policies to reduce children's television exposure are not likely to improve children's cognitive development and academic performance. Copyright of Economics of Education Review is the property of Pergamon Press - An Imprint of Elsevier Science and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.) |
|
|
Bibliography Citation
Munasib, Abdul and Samrat Bhattacharya. "Is the 'Idiot's Box' Raising Idiocy? Early and Middle Childhood Television Watching and Child Cognitive Outcome." Economics of Education Review 29,5 (October 2010): 873-883.
|