Children's Perception of truthfulness in advertising through education

Many studies explore advertising influence on children (Kunkel et al., 2004) with its intended and unintended effects (Buijzen & Valkenburg, 2003) and the various factors that can possibly – though it is not commonly shared (Buckingham, 2004) - mitigate its strength, such as quantity of advertising exposure (Gorn & Goldberg, 1978), age (Chan, 2000), parental action (Buijzen & Mens, 2007; Kline, 2011), and cognitive defenses (Brucks et al. 1988). Children’s skepticism about advertising, instead, does not necessarily decrease significatively advertising influence (Derbaix & Pecheux, 2003) but seems to be negatively related to children’s attitude toward advertising ((Buijzen, 2007). On their way to awareness of advertising, children show – differently by age - difficulties in distinguishing fantasy from reality (Khan, 2001) and perceive commercials aims (Buijzen, 2009). Our research actually analyzed a sample of primary-school children (N=116) aged 7 to 12, and through a pre-test with questionnaires (Mallincrodt & Mizersky, 2007) and focus groups (Pine & Nash, 2002) a treatment with lessons on advertising and its techniques and a post-test with same questionnaires explored their thoughts and beliefs about advertising role, their perceived truthfulness of advertising, their acceptance of advertising embellishment actions in the commercials, their attitudes towards it. Then, after the educational path on advertising construction and techniques (setting, voice, jingles, actors, testimonials, ecc.) - through ANOVA’s results - evinced whether a significant change happened in their ability to decode the advertising messages. The results led to confirm first of all, that the bases for skepticism about advertising varied both with age and with education and, secondly, evinced a low starting level in children’s skepticism about advertising. Furthermore, evidences proved that children’s skepticism grew after the educational path though it revealed a certain difficulty by children - not in grasping untruthfulness of advertising - but in accepting it - children sometimes showed correct knowledge of the matter but felt uncomfortable with it and adjusted it, modifying their answer to reach a more comfortable situation. Bases for future research are trying to verify the real relation between skepticism and influence of advertising and how genre difference acts in advertising.