Parental mediation during the U.S. 2016 presidential election campaign: How parents criticized, restricted, and co-viewed news coverage

ABSTRACT

Presidential election campaigns provide opportunities for parents to socialize their children to become politically engaged citizens. However, news coverage of the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign contained inappropriate content, leading parents to possibly restrict or denigrate rather than encourage child campaign news consumption. This study built on literatures in political socialization and parental mediation to explore mediation of campaign news coverage. Data from a representative sample of American parents during the Autumn of 2016 revealed that co-viewing, active mediation, and restrictive mediation were relatively common. The predictors of mediation included political variables, parenting orientations, and child factors, with the latter two often interacting with one another. The results have implications for how we conceptualize both political socialization and parental mediation.

KEYWORDS:

• Fake news
• externalizing
• internalizing
• news bias
• parent reflective functioning
• political talk

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Amy I. Nathanson (Ph.D. University of Wisconsin–Madison) is a Professor in the School of Communication at the Ohio State University. She studies the uses and effects of media on children and the role that parents play in mitigating media effects.

William P. Eveland, Jr. (Ph.D. University of Wisconsin–Madison) is a Professor in the School of Communication and (by courtesy) the Department of Political Science at The Ohio State University. His research examines the contributions of mass and interpersonal communication to democracy.

Notes

1 Technically, only 95% of our respondents were parents (biological, step, or adoptive). The remainder were caretakers who were relatives (3.1%) or non-relative caretakers (1.5%). Given the very small number of non-parents among the caretakers, we use the term “parent” rather than “caretaker” throughout the manuscript.

2 YouGov’s approach was identified as the most accurate of many online panel sample providers in a recent study by Pew Research Center (2016).

3 Less than 10 respondents began, but did not complete, their online interviews prior to Election Day. The final interview was completed on 14 November 2016.

4 Thus, the three items initially coded 0, 1, 2 were rescaled to 0, 0.5, and 1, and the one item initially coded 0, 1, 2, 3 was rescaled to 0, 0.33, 0.67, and 1. This permitted us to average the four items while having each retain equal weight in scale construction.

5 The one exception was an item referencing changing the TV channel when Trump or Clinton came on the news.

6 Responses of “not sure” were treated as missing.