What Do Mothers Consider When Choosing Screen Media Programs for Their Infants?

Abstract

This study aimed to understand what factors the mothers of infants consider to be important when choosing screen media programs for their children, and to investigate whether those features differ according to maternal socio-demographic characteristics (i.e., age, education level, employment status, and family income). The study participants comprised 948 mothers who were the primary caregivers and had at least one child aged 4-6. They were asked to select three of the following aspects as critical criteria for determining if a given screen media program is appropriate for infants: (a) contents suitable to the child’s developmental level, (b) behaviors of characters, (c) appearance of characters, (d) visual aspects of program, (e) duration of screen media program, (f) whether the screen media program includes instructive contents, and (g) whether the program leads to opportunities for conversations among family members and activities with children. Multiple response frequency analysis and multiple response cross-analysis were used to analyze the mothers’ responses. The results revealed that the majority of the mothers reported that ‘contents suitable to the child’s developmental level’ represented the first-ranked criterion for selecting screen media programs for their child, which was followed by ‘behaviors of characters,’ and ‘whether the screen media program includes instructive contents.’ However, such criteria for screen media programs for infants differed according to maternal age, education level, employment status, and family income. These outcomes suggest that different information needs to be provided based on maternal characteristics in order to help mothers determine the quality of screen media programs for their infants.