Since Canadian courtoom procedures differ from those of courts in the United States, a study was conducted to test the effects of United States television programs depicting legal proceedings upon Canadian viewers' beliefs about the legal system of that country. A sample of 355 Canadians (composed of eighth and twelfth grade students, first year…

This paper contains partial data from an investigation of adults and television conducted for the Canadian Royal Commission on Violence in the Communications Industry. The first section of the paper offers a discussion of the viewing behaviors of adult Canadians derived from interview data, while the second section examines the "mean world…

This study was conducted to test the relationship between dogmatism and agreement with the television character Archie Bunker among adult Canadians. It was hypothesized that highly dogmatic Canadians would demonstrate the same identification with Archie Bunker that highly dogmatic viewers from the U. S. demonstrate, and it was also hypothesized…

Content analyses of the depiction of aggression and images of reality on Canadian television were performed on 109 program tapes of top-rated Toronto programs. Content was coded in terms of global messages communicated, character portrayals, context and setting of the program, amount and nature of conflict portrayed, and detailed information on…

This paper presents a redefinition of the term "television," examines problems of determining the effects of television on children, reviews research on possible effects of TV on children, and concludes by focusing on prosocial, educational programming. The argument is made that because we are immersed in the phenomenon of television, we…

A study was conducted to explore the way network television news observes three countries friendly to the United States: Australia, Canada, and Japan. Every news story from 1968 to 1983 on the ABC, CBS, and NBC networks that mentioned any of the three countries or their people was examined. Coders classified the 4,038 stories based on origin,…

This paper discusses Canada's response to international television programming competition, both directly from signals from the United States that are available over the air or by cable, and from foreign programming exhibited by Canadian broadcasters. Major topics discussed are: (1) failure of government regulation to induce significant Canadian…

A study of the preschool television audience in Ontario, Canada, investigated the types of programs children aged two through six years old watch; in what kinds of households preschool children view TV Ontario (TVO), the Canadian public television network; and the kind of strategies that might best capture the potential preschool market.…

The political context surrounding Canadian broadcasting dramatically changed following the election of a conservative government in 1984, and Canada's current broadcasting debate is marked by national and special interest concerns. While an important social aspect of the system is its profoundly undemocratic nature, the constituent elements of a…

Informal learning environments compel the design of activities that are both appealing and educational. This paper addresses issues involved in the design of science television programs for preadolescents, drawing more specifically on the case of a French-language series currently in production in Montreal. The program goals and format are…

A study investigated the differences between television news programming in Canada and the United States in three areas: ownership (public versus private), language (French versus English), and nation of origin (Canada versus the United States), in order to determine basic differences in network TV news content Canadian viewers may experience,…

Comparison of data gathered in the late 1970s to data gathered in the early 1990s indicates that while communication researchers remain convinced that effects of intercultural mass media exist, they also acknowledge that no clear, useful theoretical framework exists. Data were analyzed, compared, and reported in the late 1970s from three…

A study examined the responses of Canadian and American subjects in their approval of, and attraction to, specific television and film characters exhibiting aggressive behavior, and in their evaluation of the realism and saliency of the characters and situations observed. Subjects, undergraduate students at the University of Windsor in Windsor,…

The five research papers that comprise this document report on research into the impact of the inception of television reception on residents of a Canadian town, "Notel." The introductory section tells how Notel and two other similar Canadian towns that already had television reception were studied just before Notel received television…

This paper makes a critical exploration into the core epistemological assumptions of mainstream television effects research and explains why the mainstream study of the cognitive impact of television on children suffers from two reductionist tendencies, i.e., television is understood by most researchers to be solely a technical medium, and most…