Study: Minority Youth Have Big Media Appetite

Associated Press (via NPR) | June 8, 2011

Minority youth spend more than half their day consuming media content, a rate that’s 4.5 hours greater than their white counterparts, according to a Northwestern University report released Wednesday.

Television remains king among all youth, but among minorities who spend 13 hours per day consuming media of various types, electronic gadgets such as cell phones and iPods increasingly are the way such content gets delivered, the report found.

“Children, Media and Race: Media Use Among White, Black, Hispanic and Asian American Children” was touted by researchers as the first national study to focus exclusively on children’s media use by race and ethnicity.

Minority youth media consumption rates outpace their white counterparts by two hours when it comes to TV and video viewership, approximately an hour for music, up to 1.5 hours for computer use, and 30 to 40 minutes for playing video games.

“In the past decade, the gap between minority and white youth’s daily media use has doubled for blacks and quadrupled for Hispanics,” said Northwestern Professor Ellen Wartella, who co-authored the study along with former Kaiser Family Foundation vice president Vicky Rideout and Northwestern post-doctoral fellow Alexis Lauri.  (Read more)