The rapid development of online environments presents challenges to researchers and scholars in various disciplines; an inter-disciplinary collaboration is needed to understand related societal phenomena in the digital age. The purpose of this chapter is to establish a research framework consisting of mass communication, social informatics, and children's literature regarding children and their racial perceptions. The uniqueness of this approach is to apply the findings of online readers' comments on a new story to a particular subject area, children's literature, in which the authors examine how societal issues are illustrated in popular books. Within this framework, the authors identify three research areas: social awareness through the communication process, social perception through the analysis of social informatics, and social adoption through illustrations in the children's books.
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