Exploratory Essay: Sesame Street and its Effects on Children in the U.S.

Sesame Street is a children’s show that has been airing since 1969 with over 50 seasons and 4,500+ episodes. This show has been forming young minds since it’s first airing and almost every single person in America has seen an episode or two in their lifetime. It is important to learn about how a show that has been seen by children for decades truly effects how they think. So, I will be discussing how I am going to study Sesame Street’s impact on the sociability of children.

First off, I must find subjects to test. I will us a simple random sampling technique to make sure that my selected sample is truly random. Out of 5000 children who have never seen Sesame Street before, I will randomly select 20 children in all 50 states whose age ranges from 3-5 years old, as this is Sesame Street’s claimed target age. Using this technique, I will have gathered 1000 different children from all around the United States. I am going to gather another 5 random children from each state in the same population who will continue not watching Sesame Street. This will give me a control group of 250 kids. These children are going to be varying nationality and economic backgrounds, as I am trying to study the effects on all children no matter their differences.

I have been given enough money to provide every family with a TCL 32” smart Roku TV. The Roku Channel has Sesame Street available to be streamed for free with ads, so I am sure every child can watch any episode while also including commercial breaks. This study will take place over two weeks and children will be required to watch 1 hour of Sesame Street (around 1 episode) every day between 9:00 and 10:00 AM. I want the children to watch the same exact episodes so I could see if the specific lessons taught in the show are portrayed by every child later. This portrayal of the specific lesson(s) in the given episode is how I am going to measure their change in sociability, since the episodes of Sesame Street try to promote that change. So, they will start at season 50, episode 1 and watch every sequential episode until the experiment is over.

Given everything I had said in the last paragraph, I am going to be using a classical experiment technique to collect the data that I desire. Since I must know that the children have never watched Sesame Street prior to the experiment, a pretest must be required for both the stimulus and control groups. I am also going to monitor both groups and their social behaviors. If the group of children who are watching Sesame Street are seen to be using the specific lesson taught in the episode. For example, in the second episode of season 50 it is Nina’s birthday, and the Muppets decide to bake a cake for her. They can’t decide who should bake the cake, so they split into two teams and have a cake bake off. Cookie Monster and Gonger are one team, and Alan and Grover are on the other. In short, the bake-off ends with neither party not completing their cakes to show Elmo and Rosita, who were the judges. They decide, however, that the result of the bake-off is that it should have not been a competition to begin with and both teams come together to make one cake for Nina. The lesson here is quite obvious, not everything has to be a competition. I would then interview the kids around a week after they stopped watching the episodes and present them a similar situation with different characters and ask them what they think should be done. The kids that had watched these episodes should recognize the lesson they had recently learned and then apply that to their answers and the control group should not. This would be the experiment itself. A posttest would then be required months after the experiment is over with very similar questions and scenarios to see if the children still retained these lessons. This change can make a positive impact on how the child acts, which can then make the child much more social later in life.

Like all experiments, this one presents some drawbacks. It is difficult to try and measure a 3–5-year old’s change in sociability without having to monitor them for a much longer period. In order to try and find out if the children did indeed become more sociable, we would have to monitor their changes in behaviors for years after the initial couple weeks. Most people don’t fully blossom into their true social selves until middle and high school, so we could not entirely know for sure right after the completion of the experiment. Maybe, in a follow up survey, I could interview the kids once they enter high school with a series of questions that could determine a person's sociability. We could also see if the children retained the lessons that they were taught in Sesame Street in these later points. The sample size I chose is also a lot smaller than the total US population, so a bigger sample size could have given me even more accurate results. It is also important to remember that there are a lot more factors that affect the way children socially interact whether they watch a specific television show or not. A child’s parents, who they choose to hang out with, other television shows they watch, etc., are among the many things that impact how we change socially. I will never be able to say that watching Sesame Street has a direct change on a child’s sociability. But, given my expected results are met, I can say that watching Sesame Street can teach the lessons that lead to someone becoming more sociable as they grow up.

This experiment could provide answers to questions that are appearing more and more in today’s world: What leads to depression in teens? Why is there a clear social gap between different students? And the list doesn’t end there. With the initial experiment, and possibly a follow-up experiment in the future, we could learn more about the sociability of children. Even though watching Sesame Street cannot directly have an impact on a child’s social behavior, we can still use this information to find connections that can bring answers to questions we have been asking for a long time.