Sociology of film : studies and documents (1946)

CHAPTER Children and Adolescents and the Cinema I. INTRODUCTORY 1 he following papers and documents were written and obtained at a fairly early stage of our investigations. (We publish them in the form in which they were submitted to Mr. Rank as preliminary reports.) We had distributed about 1,000 questionnaires in one of the Odeon Cinema Children's Clubs out of which 85 were sent back completed. We also received some 30 essays from secondary school girls about which we report at length. We believe that the selective nature of the material obtained is sufficiently stressed. We felt we had to begin somewhere. It is for this reason that we used studies by contemporary psychologists (e.g. Arlitt and Murphy) rather arbitrarily. Until our contemporary psychology develops an adequate terminology with regard to the complex and subtle phenomenon of film, the sociologist will be forced to use existing psychological terms as approximations. One last point: we were naturally also familiar with the related studies of the Payne Fund publications, but their entirely quantitative approach left us dissatisfied. So far as we found the Payne Fund studies useful for a sociology of film, we discuss the respective volumes of this series in separate chapters of this book. II. METHODS Even the most cursory view of methods to be employed in dealing with children's reactions to films must bear the following points in mind: (a) The questionnaire, taken by itself, is not very satisfactory for children for several reasons; in our case, for instance, we found that, especially among the younger children (5 — 8 years), writing out the answers is difficult and tiresome, and very few of the children 58