Media Violence and Adolescents’ ADHD-Related Behaviors: The Role of Parental Mediation

Abstract

We examined the role of parental media mediation in the relationship between media violence and adolescents’ ADHD-related behaviors. Survey data from 1,017 adolescents (10–14 years) show that parents can play an important role in this relationship, depending on the media mediation strategies that they use (i.e., restrictive or active mediation) and how they apply these strategies (i.e., in a controlling, inconsistent, or autonomy-supportive way). Our findings support the notion that contextual factors are critical in understanding media effects, and provide directions for how parents can manage their adolescents’ violent media use, and possibly by extension, their ADHD-related behaviors.

Notes

^1. The authors of the Dutch ADHD questionnaire (which was the only parent-report questionnaire in this study) report a high agreement between mothers and fathers on this scale (Scholte & Van der Ploeg, 2010). Therefore, we believe that the overrepresentation of mothers in our sample does not influence our results.

^2. We solely measured violent television and game content because previous literature has provided clear argumentation for why violence in these media could be related to ADHD-related behaviors and has repeatedly shown positive relationships between the two. There is as of yet little evidence or argumentation about how other types of media would be related to ADHD-related behaviors. Furthermore, the PPMMS was specifically targeted to media violence.

^3. It might be argued that parenting style goes beyond the media context and that the analyses should control for general parenting style. However, we found that general measures of controlling, inconsistent, and autonomy-supportive parenting were only weakly related to violent media use. Moreover, including these variables as controls in our analyses did not change the results. Thus our data suggest that with respect to violent media use, parental media mediation styles are more influential than general parenting styles.

^4. STATA does not provide model fit for SEM models using robust clustering. Model fit was therefore obtained using MPLUS 7.2. However, because MPLUS cannot combine robust clustering and bootstrapping, the model fit indices are reported for the model including robust clustering only.

^5. As previous research suggested that children with high ADHD-related behaviors may be more attracted to violent media content, we also tested the indirect effect with violent media use as outcome and ADHD-related behaviors as mediator and found no significant indirect effects for all three restrictive mediation styles.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sanne Nikkelen

Sanne Nikkelen (Ph.D., University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands) is a researcher at Rutgers, Dutch knowledge centre for sexual and reproductive health and rights in the Netherlands. Her research interests include pedagogy, media, and health.

Helen Vossen

Helen Vossen (Ph.D., University of Maastricht, The Netherlands) is an assistant professor of Clinical Child and Family Studies at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. Her research focuses on the influence of media on the development of psychosocial problems in children and adolescents.

Jessica Piotrowski

Jessica Piotrowski (Ph.D., Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania) is an associate professor at the Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR) at the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Her research investigates how children process and comprehend media content, with specific attention to the potential benefits of media.

Patti Valkenburg

Patti Valkenburg (Ph.D., Leiden University, The Netherlands) is a university professor of Media, Youth and Society at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Her research involves the interplay among child development, media-specific parenting, and media effects.