Age and content influences on children's perceptions of the realism of television families

The perceived social realism of television series featuring families with children and adolescents was studied. For the two family series they watched the most, 460 2nd, 6th, and 10th graders indicated the percentage of real-life American families they believed were like the television family on 13 different characteristics. Findings suggest that perceived social realism judgments are sensitive to content, as are developmental patterns in judgment. They further suggest that disparate findings among previous studies of age changes in perceived social realism may be explained by age, the content judged, the realism criterion used for judgment, and familiarity with both the content and its real-life referents.