prof.dr. (Peter) P Nikken

Profile

Peter Nikken is Endowed Professor on Parental Mediation in the Department of media and Communication at the Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication, Erasmus University Rotterdam.

His research interests is focused on the intermediate role of parents and professional educators for children’s media use. More specifically, Peter Nikken looks at how parents and co-educators experience the presence of media in the child’s environment and how their educational and care-giving strategies are related to the child’s development. Moreover, he also looks at how the media-industry affects parenting by either supporting parents and co-educators in their mediation practices or by creating problems for parenting.

Peter Nikken has published widely both popular and academic reports on children, young people and media in the Netherlands and abroad. In addition, he has also given many presentations on children and media regarding media violence, advertising, children's TV broadcasting policy, and sex in the media. He is an academic consultant for several organisations, including Kijkwijzer and PEGI (the age-rating classification systems for media productions), Kennisnet/Mijn Kind Online, and the Dutch Media Authority (CvdM).

Peter Nikken is also a senior researcher at the Netherlands Youth Institute (NJi) in Utrecht and Lector in Child and media studies at Windesheim university for applied science, Zwolle. He received his PhD from Leiden University in 1999 with a thesis on quality standards for children's television.