Is my kid that naive? Parents’ perceptions of their children’s attitudes towards advertising on smartphones in Chile

ABSTRACT

It is common to identify the ability to recognize advertising as a requirement for the development of a critical attitude towards commercial content. This paper reflects on the perception parents have of their children who, as active users of mobile devices, are recipients of advertising. We thought interesting to draw a comparison between parent and child responses to corroborate the level of consistency between adult perception and what children stated regarding their attitude towards the advertising to which they were exposed. In order to do so a survey was applied in dyads in 501 households in the Metropolitan Area of Santiago de Chile showing that parents and guardians tend to underestimate the trust that children place in the advertising appearing on the channels they watch most on their mobile devices. It is needed a ground a solid starting point to enable subsequent research on childcare, content supervision and parental and social mediation.

IMPACT SUMMARY

a. Prior State of Knowledge:

Researchers agree on the limitations of the conceptual knowledge of a message’s persuasive intention for children to process commercial content. However, the potential impact of the advertising children deal with through digital media, and their parents’ awareness of it, is under-researched.

b. Novel Contributions:

There are important differences in the perception of children and parents regarding mobile advertising and the way children interact with it. Parents are not aware of how their children trust the commercial messages they see while using their mobile phones.

c. Practical Implications:

Differences in perceptions between children and their parents are of interest to parental mediation researchers. From a methodological perspective, this article shows that parent-child dyad research is highly relevant, because it can reveal nuances in children’s media use and media literacy.

KEYWORDS:

• Children
• advertising
• mobile
• attitude
• dyads
• parents
• advertising literacy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This research work is endebted to the Fondecyt Initiation project No. 11170336, entitled “Minors as Consumers. Analysis of the Advertising Received by Users aged 10 to 14 through Mobile Devices”, funded by the National Commission for Scientific and Technological Research (CONICYT) of the Government of Chile;National Commission for Scientific and Technological Research (CONICYT) of the Government of Chile [Fondecyt Initiation project No. 11170336]

Notes on contributors

Beatriz Feijoo

Beatriz Feijoo, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Advertising and Marketing at the School of Business and Communication, International University of La Rioja (Spain). Her research focuses on communication and children, the use and consume of screens in new generations, and more recently on the relationship between minors and advertising through the mobile devices.

Charo Sádaba

Charo Sádaba, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Advertising and Marketing at the School of Communication of the University of Navarra (Spain). Her research has been focused on the impact of digitalization on children and teenagers, their behaviour, attitudes and opinions towards technology, particularly in Spain and Latin American countries. More recently she has started a project on the impact of technology in emerging adulthoods.