What you'll learn

• Why children may be especially influenced by television advertising.
• How adverts can communicate gender stereotypes through voices, language and product presentation.
• What Johnson and Young (2002) found about gendered voices in children’s advertising.
• How to apply strategies such as media literacy, parental mediation and regulation to reduce advertising impact.

Where this topic fits

This is a Component 03 Applied Psychology topic within Child psychology. It is also strongly linked to the social area, because it focuses on how children are influenced by messages from their social environment — in this case, television advertising.

For essays, think in three layers:

• AO1: describe the background, the key research and reduction strategies.
• AO2: apply these ideas to a new advert, child, school campaign or media scenario.
• AO3: evaluate the research and strategies using issues such as validity, ethics, usefulness and cultural bias.

Background: why advertising can affect children

Children are not just “small adults” when they watch adverts. Younger children may find it harder to recognise that adverts are designed to persuade them. They may focus on bright colours, music, humour, characters, repetition and exciting action, rather than critically judging the message.

A child who understands persuasive intent can think, “This advert is trying to make me want that toy.” A child who does not understand it may treat the advert more like ordinary entertainment or information.

Advertising can influence children in several ways:

• Attention: adverts are short, colourful and repeated.
• Memory: slogans, jingles and characters make products easy to remember.
• Desire: adverts make products seem fun, exciting, popular or necessary.
• Pester power: children may repeatedly ask parents or carers to buy advertised products.
• Social learning: children may copy behaviours or gender roles shown as rewarded or desirable.

Think of advertising influence as a chain: advert features shape what children notice, remember and imitate.

Stereotyping in children’s advertising

In children’s advertising, stereotyping can appear through:

• the type of product advertised, such as vehicles and action figures for boys, dolls and beauty-related toys for girls;
• the voice-over, meaning the unseen voice narrating the advert;
• the language, such as “battle”, “power” and “attack” compared with “love”, “beautiful” and “care”;
• the pace and sound, such as loud explosions or softer music;
• the characters, such as boys being shown as active and competitive, while girls are shown as nurturing or decorative.

This matters because repeated stereotypes may shape children’s gender schemas.

If adverts repeatedly show boys as powerful and girls as caring, children may start to treat these roles as natural or expected.

Key research: Johnson and Young (2002)

Aim

Johnson and Young (2002), in “Gendered voices in children’s advertising”, investigated how children’s television adverts used voices and language to communicate gendered messages.

Their focus was not simply “are boys and girls shown differently?” but more specifically how voice-overs, sound and wording help construct gender roles.

Method

Johnson and Young used a content analysis of children’s television advertising. They examined adverts aimed at children and coded features such as:

• whether the advert appeared targeted at boys, girls or both;
• the gender and style of the voice-over;
• the kinds of words used;
• the product type;
• the overall message about activity, power, care, beauty or relationships.

This is useful because adverts are naturally occurring media material. The researchers did not need to create artificial adverts in a lab.

Research-method link

Content analysis often produces nominal data, because categories are names rather than scores — for example, male voice-over, female voice-over or mixed voice-over. Researchers can then count frequencies and calculate percentages.

If a psychologist wanted to test whether voice-over gender was associated with target audience, a Chi-square test could be suitable because it tests for an association between two nominal variables.

Findings

Johnson and Young found that children’s adverts often used voice and language in gendered ways.

Typical patterns included:

• adverts aimed at boys using more forceful, active or competitive language;
• adverts aimed at girls using more nurturing, appearance-related or relationship-based language;
• male voices often being associated with authority, action or excitement;
• female voices being more associated with caring, sweetness or traditionally feminine products.

The key point is that the advert’s soundtrack and narration helped create gendered meanings, not just the images on screen.

Conclusions

Johnson and Young concluded that children’s advertising can reinforce traditional gender roles. Boys may be encouraged to associate masculinity with power, action and control. Girls may be encouraged to associate femininity with beauty, caring and relationships.

This supports the idea that advertising is part of the child’s social environment. It may help shape gender schemas and expectations about suitable behaviour.

Evaluating Johnson and Young (2002)

Strengths

A major strength is ecological validity. The study examined real television adverts rather than artificial materials, so the findings are relevant to the media children may actually encounter.

Another strength is usefulness. The research can inform parents, teachers, regulators and advertisers about subtle stereotyping. It draws attention to voice and language, which are easy to overlook.

Content analysis can also be fairly reliable if coding categories are clear and more than one coder is used. Researchers can check inter-rater reliability, meaning whether different coders classify adverts in the same way.

Weaknesses

A limitation is that content analysis is mainly descriptive. It can show that adverts contain stereotypes, but it cannot prove that those adverts directly change children’s beliefs or behaviour.

There may also be subjectivity in deciding whether an advert is aimed at boys, girls or both. Some products and messages are ambiguous, so coder judgement matters.

The study may be culturally and historically limited. Advertising from one country or time period may not represent advertising in other cultures, later decades or online platforms such as streaming services and social media.

Ethics

Because Johnson and Young analysed adverts rather than testing children directly, there were fewer ethical risks such as distress, deception or lack of consent from child participants.

However, the topic is still socially sensitive because it concerns gender, childhood and media influence. Researchers need to report findings carefully, without implying that all boys or all girls are the same.

Application: reducing the impact of advertising on children

OCR expects you to know at least one strategy to reduce the impact of advertising aimed at children. Strong answers usually explain the strategy and evaluate whether it is likely to work.

Strategy 1: media literacy education

A media literacy lesson might teach children to ask:

• Who made this advert?
• What does it want me to feel or do?
• What stereotypes does it show?
• What information is missing?
• Is the product really as exciting as it looks?

This strategy targets children’s understanding of persuasive intent. It is especially useful for older children who can discuss motives, evidence and stereotypes.

AO3 evaluation: media literacy is empowering because it helps children become active, critical viewers. However, it may be less effective for very young children who do not yet have the cognitive skills to analyse persuasion in depth.

Strategy 2: parental mediation

There are two main forms:

• Active mediation: watching with the child and discussing adverts critically.
• Restrictive mediation: limiting screen time, using ad-free services or avoiding channels with heavy child-targeted advertising.

Active mediation might involve a parent saying, “This advert makes the toy look exciting because it uses music and fast editing, but what do you think it would actually be like?”

AO3 evaluation: parental mediation can be flexible and immediate, but it depends on parents having time, confidence and media knowledge. It may also be harder as children access media on phones, tablets and streaming platforms.

Strategy 3: regulation

Regulation means using rules to control what advertisers can show to children and when they can show it. In the UK, organisations such as the Advertising Standards Authority and rules linked to broadcast advertising can restrict misleading or harmful adverts.

Regulation may involve:

• limiting adverts during children’s programming;
• banning adverts that exploit children’s inexperience;
• restricting harmful stereotypes;
• limiting advertising for products linked to health concerns;
• requiring adverts to be clearly recognisable as adverts.

AO3 evaluation: regulation is useful because it does not rely only on individual children or parents. However, it can be difficult to enforce across online platforms, influencers and international media.

Linking to debates

This topic links well to several wider debates.

Individual versus situational explanations

Advertising is a situational influence because it comes from the child’s environment. However, children are not passive. Age, personality, family discussion and previous beliefs affect how they respond.

Nature versus nurture

The topic mainly supports nurture, because it focuses on learned gender roles and consumer desires. It suggests children’s preferences may be shaped by repeated social messages, not simply biology.

Usefulness

The research is highly useful because it can guide media literacy teaching, parental advice and advertising regulation.

Reductionism

A weakness would be to reduce children’s gender development only to adverts. A more balanced answer recognises that advertising is one influence among many, including family, peers, school, culture and wider media.