Television viewing habits of children in chongqing (China)

Resumen

The economic gap between urban and rural group has long existed in China. Traditionally, it is believed that urban children have more media devices and can access more media resources. But the phenomenon has changed since the “new” media era. Besides, with China’s urbanization, a special group of workers emerged, the migrate workers. This group of people are usually less well educated, and do not hold a city ‘Hukou’ (registered residence). Therefore, their children cannot enter school in urban areas, and so have to leave them in hometowns and these children are taken care of by their parents and relatives. These special children are called Rural Left-behind (RLB) Children. Moreover, China is a country of diverse ethnic minorities, Han nationality (Han people/Han) is the majority, and it has other fifty-five ethnic groups. There are 38 children’s television channels in China, but only the signal of CCTV-14 can cover the whole country. Chongqing has its own ground children’s television channel. In Chongqing area, people can watch another four children’s television channels on live TV. In this study, the author chose Chongqing city as a research location, since Chongqing city had 6.7% of the ethnic minority population in 2015, Tujia and Miao are the two main ethnic groups; the other reason was that Chongqing has abundant of RLB Children. The author explored the differences in television viewing habits among urban and rural children, ordinary rural (OR) and RLB children, and different ethnic groups children (Han & Tujia, Tujia &Miao, and Miao & Han). This research included two phases, Phase 1 was quantitative which used a questionnaire to collect data, and Phase 2 was qualitative which adopted a semi-structured interview to obtain information. In Phase 1, SPSS has been adopted to analysis data. Phase 2 adopted NVIVO for processing data. The finding indicates that urban and rural, OR and RLB children, Han, Tujia and Miao children have differences in various aspects, such as media ownership, television viewing devices, co-viewing pattern, TV multitasking, etc.