Russell N. Laczniak, associate professor of marketing at Iowa State, received a prestigious award over the summer from the American Marketing Association.

He received the “Best Paper Award” in the Macromarketing/Marketing History/ Public Policy Track of the 1996 American Marketing Association Summer Marketing Educators’ Conference, which was held the first week of August in San Diego, Calif.

The title of the paper is: “Should Children’s Television Programming be Regulated? Mothers’ Perceptions and Preferences.”

The award-winning paper documents parents’ reactions to different policies involving children’s television programming. One focus of the paper is how involved the government should be in television programming for children.

Laczniak and his colleagues questioned parents and found out the different parenting styles regarding the issue. They also created four experimental groups and monitored parents’ reactions of those four groups concerning the programs their children watched.

“We were somewhat surprised to see a large portion of parents want government intervention,” Laczniak said. “We questioned parents both in Ames and South Carolina, and many parents were willing to participate.”

Michelle Newton, a sophomore in business, has a three year-old daughter, and is very concerned with the programs on television.

“I think that some of the things on TV are corrupting the minds of our youth,” Newton said. “Certain programs should not appear at certain times on public and cable television.”

Newton said she monitors what her daughter watches, and she feels this is one way to make sure she knows what her child is watching.

Laczniak and his colleagues are currently trying to revise their paper and submit it to the Journal of Advertising’s special issue concerning children television programming.

Laczniak co-wrote the paper with Les Carlson of Clemson University and Ann Walsh of Lewis-Clark State College.

The American Marketing Association is the world’s largest professional society for marketers with a membership of 50,000 marketing practitioners, academics and students. There were nearly 800 in attendance at the association’s summer conference.

Approximately 100 papers were accepted by the association, and out of all the papers that were accepted, one out of 27 were chosen to be presented at the summer conference, Laczniak said.