Canada’s ACT Developing New Kids’ TV Study

MONTREAL: The Alliance for Children and Television (ACT) is embarking on what it is describing as the largest study to date on Canadian youth programming, to be led by the Centre for Youth and Media Studies at the Université de Montréal.

The initiative, which is being supervised by Dr. André H. Caron, Ed. D., is being conducted with the financial assistance of CTVglobemedia (CTVgm), through the CTVgm/CHUM tangible benefits.

“This two-phase analysis will not only cover the traditional key components of children’s programming, such as context, characters and actions, but also more recent societal issues like ecology and the environment,” says Caroline Fortier, the executive director of ACT. “It will also touch on the growing importance of children’s programming being developed for new delivery platforms.”

The first phase will analyze a representative sample from more than 1,000 hours of programming aired throughout Canada in spring 2009. Indicators will include formal variables such as age and gender representation in children’s programming, as well as the presence of foreign cultures and languages. This data will later be compared with the results of a larger study conducted by the Munich-based International Central Institute for Youth and Educational Television (IZI), called Children’s Television Worldwide: Gender Representation.