Reframing media effects in terms of children’s rights in the digital age

As research on children and the internet grows, this article debates the intellectual and political choices researchers make when they frame their work in terms of effects (often risk-focused) or rights (drawing on the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child). I contrast these frameworks in their guiding assumptions, methodology, conception of children and of media, and stance towards evidence-based policy. The case for media effects research, as well as its critique, is well known among researchers of children and media, but the case for a rights-based approach—and its accompanying critique—appears less familiar and so I examine it here in more depth. I conclude with an endorsement of research on—but not necessarily advocacy for—children’s rights in the digital age in a way that encompasses the insights both of effects research and of qualitative and participatory research with children.