Children's Media Habits and Parental Attitudes

Highlights

In today's complex media environment, data on children's media habits and parental attitudes is the basis for developing relevant media and educational policies and activities aimed at providing a safer media environment and enhancing media and information literacy among children, parents, caregivers and education professionals. Prior to this study, there had been no comprehensive report on media and information-communication technologies (ICT) use and habits of children in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Research from neighboring countries can provide certain indicative results, but the findings may be different due to the particular context in BiH. Media use among children is constantly changing; however, a better understanding of habits, primary sources of information and the role of parents offers an opportunity to determine priority interventions and develop evidence-based communication strategies aimed at children, parents, caregivers and education professionals.

Therefore, and in order to improve the knowledge about the interaction between children and media (including online platforms), the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in BiH and the Regulatory Communication Agency (RCA) engaged Custom Concept (CC), a professional agency for public opinion and market research and consulting, to conduct a comprehensive study in BiH, based on previous international experience and adapted to the current situation and context in BiH, on a nationally representative sample of children and parents. The aim of this study was to obtain data on how children access media, the content they view / follow / listen to / create, how much time they spend using different media, parental supervision and rules on media use, and how they assess their knowledge about media and the sources of information they rely on to learn more about this issue.