Empowering children to deal with advertising

This project aims to develop and test a theory-driven, school-based advertising intervention named Reclame Masters that can successfully stimulate 8- to 12-year old children’s advertising coping behaviour in the current media landscape.

The project provides insights into how advertising and media literacy education programs could be developed in order to be effective in helping children to deal with advertising and media in a more autonomous, conscious and critical manner. The project uses an advertising empowerment approach that seeks to provide children with more control over the influence that advertising and media have on their thoughts, feelings, and behavior. To this end, the project investigates a combination of theory-based behavior change techniques (self-persuasion, emotion labeling, and implementation-intentions) from the field of persuasive communication, and social and developmental psychology, which are translated into the intervention program Reclame Masters.

This research project is funded by a Veni-grant of the Dutch Science Foundation (NWO).