School Children’s Media Literacy as Seen by Teachers and Parents: Results of a Research

Section: Sociology of Journalism

This paper is based on the results of a research project “School Children’s Media Consumption: the Information Age and Children’s Socialization in Post-Transition Society” conducted by the Faculty of Journalism, Lomonosov Moscow State University, in 2013-2016. The relevance of the study stems from the global context, which includes the ambiguity of the social consequences of the intensification of media processes and societal attempts to influence the processes of children’s media consumption. The value regulators that can mitigate dangerous trends are vague and unstable in Russian society; the traditional institutions of socialization are in crisis. This is why society expresses concern about the uncontrollable influence of media communications on children’s socialization and health and calls to regulate the information flows. However, the steps recently taken in this direction caused contradictory and often critical responses of both producers and consumers of media content. Society requires accurate, constantly updated information to improve the conceptual approaches to these processes and, in particular, to develop media content strategies meeting the goals of children’s socialization in their modern understanding. These conclusions can be drawn from the results of a survey among teachers and parents (more than 100 respondents) conducted in several Russian cities and towns.

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