Television message of programmes and publicity addressed to children: approach to the quality of its content

Abstract

The present reflections comprises the work that nowadays develops an investigation group that tries to design an instrument that allows to mesure the quality of television audio-visual messages addressed to children (between 4-12 years). The information that follows is the result of a research that was made by this group from October 2003 since October 2004. And continues until 2007. Therefore their results have to be considered as partial. For the analysis of the content of the messages (advertisements some of them, others from programmes) were selected two weeks of programmes: one during non-holiday period (last week of May) and another one corresponding to the holiday period (third week of Desember 2003). Concerning to the supports, open emission and national covering channels were chosen, such as: TVE 1, TVE 2, Antena 3 and Tele 5. Holiday periods which may change the common programmes were considered as well. We should also point that when the program was emitted between Monday and Friday, two chapters or episodes were analyzed; when it was emitted during the weekend, all of them were analyzed. The same process was followed with the advertisements which were included in the selected programmes. Summing up, the analysis gathered 241 contents corresponding to programmes and 1.150 to advertisements. According to the objectives, the study is based on a general one-the analysis and the evaluation of the audio-visual contents quality-, and two specific ones: the first one is centered in the description of the offer and the consume of children programmes; the second one looks for the configuration of a quality measurement system of the audio-visual contents addressed to children. Our work will deal with this last one. The programmes and advertisements have been subjected to the analysis of 24 variables that can be combined or put together in the following ways: «main teaching from the messages», «interactivity level», «presence or not of physical, verbal and genus violence«, «prosocial behaviour», «asocial behaviour», «language (oral expression, grammatical constructions, offensive words and vocabulary) and «sexual contents». The study has allowed us to show the importance of these variables in television messages for children, as well as to state similarities and differences between children publicity and programmes..