The Family and Television

Abstract

The potential of family members to serve as mediators of learning from television has received increasing amounts of attention in the literature. At the same time, the involvement of parents in their children's viewing has been found to be low. Using sample episodes from an ethnographic research study, this article describes several types of family mediation that have not been emphasized in the literature: contextual mediation, informal verbal mediation that occurs outside of the viewing situation, and mediation by families' organization in time and space. The authors suggest that ethnography can contribute to our understanding of the mediation of television by the family by documenting mediational influences that are unintentional, nonverbal, or occur at times other than during viewing.