CHILDRENS UNDERSTANDING OF EVENTS AND CRIMINAL-JUSTICE PROCESSES IN POLICE PROGRAMS

Television viewing may provide input to children's knowledge of crime and law enforcement, but little is known of how young viewers interpre t such material. The study reported here investigates how children and adults represent the content of police programs, their understanding of the various scenes, their temporal organization and the various mod els of criminal justice. Using the script framework of event represent ation, it was found that with age, accounts of what happens on police programs became more elaborate and hierarchical. Young children were f ound primarily to understand action-salient scenes but interpreted mor e conceptually demanding scenes such as the police investigation and t he courtroom quite differently from older viewers. Older children begi n to understand more complex scenes, and the temporal organization of the various scenes. Analyses of the models of criminal justice implici t in individuals' scripts indicated developmental changes, from pursui t representations in the younger children, through crime control model s for most of the older viewers, to acknowledgment of due process (rig hts of the accused, trial procedures) among some of the older children and adults.