Age recommendations for children’s films: associations between advisories on a U.S. site and parents’ ratings

ABSTRACT Parents may rely on media content classification systems such as those on the Common Sense Media website to help make decisions about what films are appropriate for their child. In this paper, we examine the relationships between Common Sense Media “expert” age/content ratings for 7132 films and the age recommendations made by parents commenting on the site. In addition to examining the extent of correspondence between these two sources of age classification, we examine whether “expert” ratings of the level of particular types of content in each film was associated with parents’ age classifications. Our research results indicate that age ratings of one out of five parents of our sample data cannot be predicted by the expert ratings. In general, parents tended to have stricter age recommendations than the Common Sense Media experts. Regression analyses indicate that parent age ratings showed (successively weaker) associations with expert ratings of the extent to which each film contained adult language, sex, violence, scary content, educational value, substance use, and consumerism. Impact Summary Prior State of Knowledge: Information and communication technologies have modified the way children entertain themselves, but also the complexity of parental mediation. Parents rely on content classification systems to help them make informed decisions about audiovisual content in linear TV but also on video-on-demand. Novel Contributions: We show that a percentage of parents cannot rely on experts’ age ratings, because they have different views on what is appropriate for their children. In addition, we try to explore how several factors influence parents’ views on age classification. Practical Implications: The study draws parents’ and policymakers’ attention, as we elucidate that audiovisual classification systems should follow a more personalized, parent-centric approach, so that parents are able to make informed decisions following their parenting views, without being suppressed by the norm.