Abstract

Television has powerful effects on children. Howewer TV gives positive messages to children it also can cause children to be inactive and prevent their creative play activities. In this study, it was aimed at to determine the television viewing habits of school age children between 6–12 years old. That Cross-sectional type study has been conducted on 100 students who were selected with stratified randomised sampling method according to sex, age and class among 492 students who were taken education from first step of the Ankara-Çiğiltepe Primary Education School. Mean age of school age children who were involved in study was 9.1±1.5. It was detemined that 43% of children (n=43) were watching TV more than 3 hours a day, 54% of them were watching TV to relieve their boredom and 48% of them were watching TV because they like watching. When the spare time activities of children were examined it was determined that they were spending their time by playing and making sportive activities with the highest rate (n=95, 26.1%), and television viewing was in the third order (n=61, 17.3%). In this study, it was determined that most of the children were watching TV under the offered time, children whose mother were not working were watching TV for longer time, and TV watching time of the children were increasing with increasing age.

Key words: Television viewing, school age

Article Language: Turkish English