20. Children and Media

: Focusing on main trajectories of development, this chapter analyses how children’s relations to media have been researched within a mainstream effects paradigm, still dominating research and university studies in the United States and parts of Asia, and a more culturalist paradigm that has developed on the European continent from the 1980s on and taken root in many parts of the world. Examples are offered of key studies within each paradigm as a lever for identifying recurrent research issues and aspects of critique that have occupied scholars within the two paradigms. Finally, the chapter discusses major transformations in the research on children’s relations to media, and it points to recent encounters between the two paradigms, encounters the are chiefly a result of deep changes in children’s media practices. In briefly charting these transformations, the chapter illuminates how research on children’s relations to media is ultimately deeply dependent upon what happens in children’s own lives and in institutional ramifications that are not of their own choosing .