The role of socioeconomic status in U.S. children’s co-viewing television and family member relationship quality over time

ABSTRACT

Previous research on family television co-viewing has tended not to examine variation by socioeconomic status (SES). This research uses time diaries from socioeconomically and racially diverse child and adolescent respondents (ages 8–17) from the Child Development Supplement of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) in 2002 (N = 1918), 2007 (N = 1288), 2014 (N = 743), and 2019 (N = 622). I investigate socioeconomic differences in children’s total shared TV time and how SES interacts with children’s TV co-viewing to shape child-reported relationship quality with their most co-viewing family members. I find that parental educational attainment is significantly associated with total shared television time, but not consistently with child-reported closeness to family members. I find that co-viewed television time is only significantly associated with closeness to their most co-viewing family member in some waves for those whose head of household education is less than high school. Mothers being the most co-viewing family member, however, emerged as significantly associated with child-reported closeness at all waves, emphasizing the importance of co-viewing television specifically for the mother-child relationship.

Impact Summary

Prior State of Knowledge

Previous research has explored the relationship between children’s co-viewing television with family, but without consideration of SES-based differences in television time.

Novel Contributions

Parental educational attainment is significantly associated with children’s total shared TV time. Socioeconomic status and co-viewing time are not consistently significantly associated with child-reported closeness to their co-viewing partner, though mothers being the co-viewer is associated across sample year.

Practical Implications

This has implications for researchers investigating the role of socioeconomic status in television and family dynamics, helping to tease apart classed and gendered television-viewing patterns.

KEYWORDS:

• Class
• television time
• television co-viewing
• family relationships
• parent-child relationships
• childhood
• motherhood

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Christine Schwartz, Jonathan Gray, Marcia J. Carlson, Joan Fujimura, and Mignon Moore for their feedback and review of earlier versions of this manuscript. The author is grateful for support from the American Sociological Association Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant and the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin – Madison.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/17482798.2024.2355166

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available through the Panel Study of Income Dynamics public use data at https://simba.isr.umich.edu/data/data.aspx, specifically in the CDS-TAS Data Center.

Notes

1. The average accounted for missingness. So a child who lived with a single mother and no siblings, for example, would have this closeness measure reflect the reported closeness to just their mother.

2. For example, the coefficient implied by Table 3 for those < 100% poverty with less than high school in 2002 is 0.161–0.015 + 0.006=.152

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the American Sociological Association under the Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant.

Notes on contributors

Annaliese Grant

Annaliese Grant is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Her research focuses on the classed and gendered dynamics of family and child media use and care work, using both quantitative and qualitative methods.