Study title

The Media Panel Program (MPP) is located at the University of Lund in Sweden. It is a long-term research program focused on basic aspects of the mass media use by Swedish children, adolescents and young adults, as well as on the causes, consequences and effects of that media use. The program was founded by professors Karl Erik Rosengren and Sven Windahl in 1975, after a series of preliminary studies. Since 1995, the program has been directed by professor Ulla Johnsson-Smaragdi. Data have been collected in Malmö (an industrial city in southern Sweden; some 230 000 inhabitants) and Växjö (a college and cathedral town in southern Sweden; some 60 000 inhabitants). The techniques used for data collection include mail and classroom questionnaires, personal interviews, essays written by school children at school, archival data, focused interviews, and long, in-depth conversations with a small number of type-representative individuals. For children and adolescents in grade 3-9 (age 10 to 16) in the compulsory school system, class room questionnaires were used. For older adolescents and young adults, as well as for parents, mail questionnaires were used. School grades and similar data were culled from school archives. During a long period of continuous research the MPP group has produced a data bank in which a large mass of data related to individual media use, its causes, effects and consequences are stored, covering a number of cohorts and panels of children and adolescents passing through the school system and into work or continued studies during their early adulthood. In all, the bank contains data about: some 5 000 children, adolescents and young adults; their family background, activities and relations; their relations to peers and their school experiences (including school grades etc.); their media use, life styles, present occupation and activities, as well as their plans for the future. Relevant data from their parents have also been collected on several...