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This article addresses several elaborations and specifications of Gerbner and Gross' (1976) cultivation hypothesis: that heavy television viewers incorporate biases present in television content into their own construc tions of reality. Subjects were 1280 children from grades 2, 5, 8, and 11 in Perth, Western Australia who answered questions designed to tap their perceptions of violence and "meanness" in society. The cultivation relation ship between viewing and beliefs was replicated with these Australian schoolchildren, but only for adolescents, suggesting that the integration of discrete television events into social reality beliefs requires cognitive skills not available to or unused by younger children. Division of children's viewing into different content types indicated that beliefs about violence stemmed most clearly from crime-adventure programs and cartoons, but perceiving a mean world is related more globally to all television viewing.

Children have previously been shown to redirect their attention actively away from Sesame Street segments rendered less comprehensible by either random ordering of scenes or alterations of the audio track (Greek or backward speech). In this study, the visual attention of 60 children, ages 3.5, 5, and 6.5, was tracked for smaller time units and showed an early (though not immediate) increase in attention to random segments, suggesting an attempt to deal with difficult but seemingly accessible content. Attention to segments with incomprehensible language decreased quickly and stayed low for all ages. Analyses of lengths of individual looks at television replicated the attentional inertia phenomenon, but with noteworthy differences between the three types of segments, and especially for looks at the television during latter parts of segments. The findings are interpreted in terms of Huston and Wright's sampling model of attention. Surprisingly, there was little evidence of developmental changes in these results.

As the Internet's presence in health care grows more pervasive, an increasing number of health care providers have begun to implement eHealth innovationsin their practice. The interactive health communication system (IHCS), one such eHealth solution, provides consumers with information, informal support, and a venue for communication. Investing in eHealth: What it Takes to Sustain Consumer Health Informatics examines the evolution of the IHCS and the significant changes in organizational culture and operational systems that may be required for successful and sustained implementation.This book explores the development of a model (funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality in 1998) to predict and explain the degree of success of such implementation efforts. This model allows an institution to benchmark its progress towards IHCS implementation and advises administrators where to invest resources to increase the chance of successful implementation. A set of case studies highlights key features of the model, each study describes an attempt by an organization to implement the Comprehensive Health Enhancement Support System (CHESS), a proven IHCS. After examining the success or failure of each particular implementation, the book suggests steps that could have been taken to address weaknesses identified by the model. Investing in eHealth culminates in a set of general guidelines for any health care provider striving to successfully employ the model, and suggests directions for future research.

Previous research and theory have focused on nonstrategic explanations for attentional inertia phenomena in television viewing (that looks become more stable and reflect greater cognitive engagement as they get longer). However, varying relatedness of episodes, for which strategic inertial processes should vary in strength, produces a corresponding difference in inertia of looks crossing those boundaries. Although an additive model would suggest that all these within-narrative boundaries should show stronger relationships than at unrelated-content boundaries, this was not the case. It may thus be that results previously interpreted as reflecting nonstrategic processes instead result from strategic processes not before considered.

The television systems of Sweden and the United States are different in very interesting ways, stemming from a combination of historical, economic, technical and cultural factors. This study investigated viewer behaviour in these two different systems, using variables constructed from television viewing diaries and questionnaire responses. Results showed five clusters of viewer behaviours for each country, with a general similarity in clusters between Sweden and the US. However, further analysis showed a surprising dissimilarity: while social class, gender and uses and gratifications all predicted viewer type in Sweden, none of these variables predicted viewer type in the US. The authors speculate that some of these differences may be structural, but others cultural.

Research on children's comprehension of television suggests that very young children have difficulty ordering major scenes from a story, and generally do not have adultlike understandings of television. More recent research with young children using short and simple stimuli and a method designed to maximize children's communication abilities suggests that these earlier studies may have underestimated children's comprehension. In this study, three- to five-year-olds viewed an 8-minute version of Diff'rent Strokes, and then were asked to reenact the story with dolls and appropriate props. Analyses of the quality of the stories showed that 70% of the children comprehended most of the event clusters of the program. While their versions of the story were not nearly as detailed or rich as adults' versions, they did not indicate that the children had constructed qualitatively different meanings from the story.