Reframing media effects in terms of children’s rights in the digital age

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Abstract
As research on children and the internet grows, this article debates the intellectual and political choices researchers make when they frame their work in terms of effects (often risk-focused) or rights (drawing on the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child). I contrast these frameworks in their guiding assumptions, methodology, conception of children and of media, and stance towards evidence-based policy. The case for media effects research, as well as its critique, is well known among researchers of children and media, but the case for a rights-based approach—and its accompanying critique—appears less familiar and so I examine it here in more depth. I conclude with an endorsement of research on—but not necessarily advocacy for—children’s rights in the digital age in a way that encompasses the insights both of effects research and of qualitative and participatory research with children.