Children, young people and the news: A systematic literature review based on Communication Abstracts

Abstract

Despite having their roots in Medicine and being more frequently used in Natural Sciences, systematic reviews can also be extremely useful when it comes to the Social Sciences, namely when the aim is to conduct a study that identifies and maps the subject of interest of scientists in a given area. In this paper, a systematic literature review has been applied to the main database in the field of Communication, Communication Abstracts, as to try and understand who studied the relationship between children and/or young people and the news, when and where that happened, as well as the angle of the investigation. A sample of 146 titles and abstracts was reviewed. The findings show that most of them were reception and representation studies, whereas production studies were in much smaller number; studies on parental mediation and journalists' ethical concerns when covering events involving children and young people were practically residual.