Child and Family Mediascape Research Group (CFMRG)
About
The Child and Family Mediascape Group (CFMRG) aims to help create a safe and socially responsive mediascape for children and their families in Australia through research and engagement.
We study both younger and older children (including adult children), and our focus is multigenerational.
Based in the School of Culture and Communication, we actively engage with industry networks and community organisations to understand and enrich the media culture of children and their families in Australia and the world.
Our long-term core objectives are:
- Develop cross-disciplinary research into the interplay of traditional and digital media in families’ lives
- Expand interdisciplinary scholarly networks to foster collaboration and knowledge exchange
- Engage in collaborative efforts with industry stakeholders
- Generate academic publications and public reports to contribute valuable insights to the field.
Research
Changes in children’s screen media use during & after the pandemic
Key findings from our research are:
Our results also demonstrate that the pandemic brought about significant changes in how parents manage their children’s access to and use of a range of media, shedding light on the important roles played by parents as primary media socialisation agents for youth.
Publications
- Day, K., Shin, W., Nolan, S., ‘Children’s Reading and Screen Media Use Before, During and After the Pandemic: Australian Parent Perspectives.’ Communication Research and Practice (2024)
- Nolan, S., Day, K., Shin, W., Wang, W., ‘Books Versus Screens: A Study of Australian Children’s Media Use During the COVID Pandemic’. Publishing Research Quarterly (2022), 38: 749–759.
Presentations
- Independent Publishing Conference, Wheeler Centre, Melbourne, Victoria, December 2021
- Australian and New Zealand Communications Association Conference, University of Wollongong, NSW, November 2022
- Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing, SHARP 2023, University of Otago, NZ, June 2023.
Research Activity Summary
The team is currently writing a monograph, Children, Screens and the Future of Reading, led by Sybil Nolan and based on our surveys and interview data. Wonsun Shin is working with international collaborators to investigate parental mediation and reverse media socialisation in the post-COVID era in Australia, Indonesia and Singapore. Xin Pei and Wonsun Shin are studying the role of adult children in the adoption of smart technologies by ageing parents. Katherine Day and Xin Pei are exploring uses of generative AI in media content for children.
Our research began in 2021, when some group members began to study changes in children’s media use caused by the long COVID lockdowns. Our aim was to investigate how increased screen use was affecting children’s lives, including activities such as book reading and play.
Since November 2021, we ran two large national surveys of Australian parents. This research was supported by grant funding in 2021 and 2022 from the School of Culture and Communication.
In 2022, Wonsun Shin also received seed funding from the Faculty of Arts to pilot qualitative research towards an ARC Linkage grant application: this pilot has now been completed and is at write-up.
In June 2023, the Child and Family Mediascape Research Group was formally established as a Tier 3 research group within the Faculty of Arts, University of Melbourne.
People
Our team has interdisciplinary expertise in both digital and traditional media – from books and ebooks to television, personal screens and artificial intelligence – as well as former media professionals.
A/Prof Wonsun Shin, Co-Lead
Associate Professor in Media and Communications in the School of Culture and Communication and co-leader of the CFMRG, Wonsun's research examines how various groups in our society, including young people and their caregivers, engage with digital media in an increasingly commercialised world. Her recent and ongoing work focuses on the role of parental mediation in children’s use of digital media and interactions with digital advertising, teenagers’ privacy management strategies on social media and adult consumers’ responses to data-driven advertising.
Wonsun has published numerous journal articles, book chapters, and books, including Screen-Obsessed: Parenting in the Digital Age (2019) and Screen Smart: Growing Up in the Digital Age (2023). She actively contributes to scholarly communities in various roles, such as an Associate Editor of the Journal of Advertising and a member of the Editorial Review Boards for Communication Research and Practice and the International Journal of Advertising.
Within the CFMRG, Wonsun leads national surveys of parents, contributing to a better understanding of the changing role of parents in children’s screen media consumption in rapidly evolving media landscape.
Find an expert - Orchid - Linkedin - wonsun.shin@unimelb.edu.au
Dr Sybil Nolan, Co-Lead
Senior Lecturer in Publishing and Communications in the School of Culture and Communication, and co-leader of the CFMRG. Before joining the University of Melbourne, Sybil worked in media industries for 25 years, first as a daily newspaper journalist, later as a commissioning editor and editorial consultant in book publishing. Her media research over the past decade has focused on digital disruption and its impacts on book publishing and other traditional print culture.
She was a chief investigator on the ARC Discovery Project ‘New Tastemakers and Australia’s Post-Digital Literary Culture’, led by Professor Mark Davis. The COVID pandemic aroused her interest in how children’s reading was affected by lockdowns and online schooling.
She was lead author on the group’s first journal article, Books Versus Screens: A Study of Children’s Media during the COVID Pandemic (2022), led the group's interview research with parents and librarians in 2022-23 with assistance from Dr Lauren Bliss, and is currently leading the writing of the group’s monograph about its research.
Find an expert - Orcid - Linkedin - sybil.nolan@unimelb.edu.au
Dr Katherine Day
Lecturer in Publishing Practice at The University of Melbourne and a former editor, Katie has over 15 years of experience in-house and freelance for some of Australia’s most well-known publishing houses, including Penguin Random House, Allen & Unwin, Thames and Hudson, and Working Title Press.
Katie’s work on the group’s first national survey, published as Books Versus Screens: A Study of Australian Children’s Media Use During the Covid Pandemic (2022), explored children’s reading habits before, during and after the pandemic lockdowns, revealing increased tablet use.
Her work within the CFMRG further explores this activity and the plight of children’s picture books in a converged literary landscape, assessing how picture book publishers cater to diverse readerships and new reading platforms in the digital age, the results of which can be found in her most recent publication Children’s Digital Picture Books: Readers and Publishers (Routledge 2024).
Dr Xin Pei
Lecturer in in Media and Communications in the School of Culture and Communication. Before joining the University of Melbourne, Xin studied and worked at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore; The Chinese University of Hong Kong; the University of Nottingham; Ningbo China; and the Ageing Research Institute for Society and Education (ARISE) in Singapore. Her research focus lies in examining the social consequences of adopting information and communication technologies (ICTs) in the context of marginalisation. Xin uses an interdisciplinary approach to investigate the (dis)empowerment brought about by the adoption and usage of ICTs in different contexts encompassing gender, ageing and racism.
Her research has appeared in leading journals such as New Media & Society, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Information, Communication & Society, and Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies.
A current research project focuses on intergenerational technology transmission from adult children to their ageing parents, exploring the concerns and challenges faced by adult children when integrating digital technologies in aged care.
Dr Lauren Bliss
Media researcher and sessional teacher, Lauren writes and researches the history and figuration of pregnancy in screen cultures, cultures of parenting on digital media, social media genres and inclusion and diversity in secondary school English and media curricula.
Lauren is the author of The Maternal Imagination of Film and Film Theory (Palgrave: 2020) and has been published extensively in journals including First Monday, Journal of Television and New Media, Senses of Cinema, as well as English in Australia, Idiom and The Australian Educational Researcher.
In 2022, she helped lead CFMRG’s qualitative research on the impacts of pandemic lockdowns on children’s reading and use of screens.
Contact
For more information or to work with us, have a look at our flyer or contact either:
- A/Prof Wonsun Shin
- wonsun.shin@unimelb.edu.au
- +61 3 9035 3519
- Dr Sybil Nolan
- sybil.nolan@unimelb.edu.au
- +61 3 83447398