The environment that young people inhabit strongly influences their media behavior. Clearly, which media are available in their homes, and the social and psychological context surrounding those media, affect how much time they spend reading, listening, or viewing, and the kinds of media content to which they are exposed. For example, children and adolescents from households equipped with a personal computer are more likely to use computers, hence become more computer literate and gain various educational and economic advantages, than are youngsters from households lacking a personal computer (National Telecommunications and Information Administration, 1998, 1999). It is clear throughout this book that access plays a powerful role in media behavior. Similarly, children from families that impose rules on television viewing tend to watch fewer than and/or different television programs from children from families in which there are no controls on viewing (Comstock & Scharrer, 1999; Stanger, 1997). Thus, household norms also influence media behavior in important ways. The point is that the household media environment matters.

In this chapter we examine the kinds of media to which U.S. children and adolescents have in-home access, as well as some dimensions of the social context within which that access takes place.We begin by describing the electronic media directly available to the young people in our sample. We look first at media in the household, then narrow the focus to media available in young people's own bedrooms (as well as the proportion of seventh through twelfth graders who subscribe to their own magazines). We assume that an environment in which young people possess their own TV sets, radios, computers, video-game players, or magazine subscriptions differs from one where media are shared with others in a more public room. Moreover, we assume that the differences are likely to influence a variety of media (and nonmedia) behaviors. Finally, we examine several indicators of “household television orientation, ” each of which is employed in subsequent chapters to examine aspects of media consumption. The focus is on “television orientation” because it is the medium with which families spend the most time and that they are most likely to attempt to control.