Television watching exposure from childhood to early adulthood

Television (TV) watching is a prevalent sedentary behaviour across the life span, often in addition to other screen based media. In spite of the accumulated data from studies showing the negative association of TV watching and health outcomes, specifically over developmental epochs such as early childhood, adolescence, entry into young adulthood and during later adult years, little is known about the longitudinal pattern of TV watching over these critical developmental periods (Thorp, Owen et al. 2011). Some evidence suggests TV viewing appears to be a fairly stable behaviour over a number of years of sample follow up. However the handful of studies examining how TV viewing tracks throughout childhood and adolescence and into young adulthood have been varied in their analytical approach (Hancox, Milne et al. 2004, Biddle, Pearson et al. 2010, Francis, Stancel et al. 2011) and few studies have had more than 2 or 3 years of follow up in their assessments, and thus may have missed identifying longitudinal patterns which may occur over critical developmental periods. The purpose of this study was to explore TV watching exposure at a group level over a period of 15 years across developmental epochs of childhood, adolescence and young adulthood.