Consumption of communications media in a children and adolescent’s population

Objective: analyse TV consumption and the use of videogame consoles, computers, the Internet or mobile phones by children and young teenagers in order to design educational intervention programmes.

Methodology: non interventional, descriptive and cross sectional study by means of a survey performed on young people between 8 and 14 years. Statistical analysis: descriptive study of the collected variables and their subsequent univariant analysis.

Results: communications media were present in their bedrooms with these results: thirtyfive point one percent have a TV set, 21.3% a computer and 5.4% Internet, where TV was the most highly valued. Sixty-two point nine percent of youngsters watch TV between 1 and 3 hours a day, 97% do not respect the children?s broadcast schedule and 54.4% of youngsters have the TV watching time limited by their parents. Seventy-five point seven percent have a videogame console; it is used mostly by male youngsters (92%). Seventy-five point eight percent of those polled have a computer, and 36.8% of them have its use limited by their parents. Thirty-four point five percent out of those who have a computer have an Internet connection and both, boys and girls, say they browse the web mostly to search for information (42.7%). Forty-five percent own a mobile phone, 50% of them use it daily. No significant differences were found between daily use and gender (p = 0.5), but there were significant differences between daily use and age or between owning a mobile phone and age. Seventy four point four percent do not have mobile use limited by their parents.

Conclusions: society in general and health professionals in particular should provide more health education with regard to the communications media consumption. Parents should limit its abusive consumption, forbid the presence of all these devices in children?s bedrooms and monitor videogame contents and the web pages their children visit. Besides, prepay mobile phones should not be used by people under 14.

Keywords: Adolescent. Child. Television. Internet. Video games. Computer. Communications media.