The preceding chapters have looked at young people's media behavior from a “mediacentric” perspective. That is, we have focused on each individual medium (and on media overall), exploring their roles in children's and adolescents' lives. Our perspective changes somewhat in this chapter. Rather than beginning with media, we begin with the young people themselves, then explore how their attitudes, abilities, and actions are related to their media behaviors. In the following pages we examine such things as whether and how social adjustment or “contentedness” and academic performance relate to media behavior. We also compare heavy and light media users and examine the degree to which high exposure to one medium relates to amount of exposure to other media. Finally, we report the results of an analysis conducted to determine whether 8- to 18-year-olds can be classified into different “types” of media users.

PERSONAL CONTENTEDNESS AND MEDIA USE

A negative relationship between media consumption and various conceptualizations of social satisfaction or contentedness or “affective equilibrium” has long been noted, to the point that “greater-than-ordinary use of pictorial media such as television arguably has become recognized as a possible symptom of personal maladjustment” (Comstock, 1991, p. 33). Several early studies of young people's TV use found that children and adolescents having difficulties with parents or friends devote more time to television than do better adjusted youngsters (Johnston, 1974; Maccoby, 1954; Schramm et al., 1961; Tangney, 1988). Similar relationships have also been reported for young people's VCR usage (Morgan, Alexander, Shanahan, & Harris, 1990) and for adolescents' music consumption (Christenson & Roberts, 1998; Lyle & Hoffman, 1972a). Finally, there is evidence that adults and older adolescents use media for mood management – to escape unpleasant emotions and/or maintain satisfying mood states (Kubey, 1986; Kubey & Czikszentmihalyi, 1990; Zillmann, 1988).

To determine whether a relationship between media use and contentedness still holds, we included a small battery of items assessing the degree to which young people or their parents view themselves or their children as well adjusted or contented.