Does music video impact adolescent development?
Current literature regarding music video television reports that adolescents watch music video simply to be entertained. The limited focus of the literature on stereotypes, deviant behaviors, and negative images in videos must be balanced by empirical investigations that examine the cognitive processes that occur when adolescents watch music videos. Although entertainment may clearly be hypothesized as one possible layer of why adolescents watch music videos, mass communication theory, adolescent developmental theory, and ecological systems theory clearly provide additional, developmentally plausible explanations. This study examined the medium of music video and the adolescent in the context of the relevant social processes and the salient psychological task of adolescent development–identity formation. The study extended the literature by quantitatively assessing three potential domains of adolescent music video processing: social competence, negative identity, and entertainment onl
