Medis Effect on Violence in children
There is evidence that promotes the view that anti-social behaviour can be promoted by the media. Some of the effects are short lived and others will vary depending on whether the anti-social behaviour is shown on it's own or not. Violent video games and TV are the main sources of media violence.On TV there is very little aggression overall. The Gerbner Studies (1970's and 1980's) found that in children's TV programmes 20 violent acts per hour occurred. Since 1967, the percentage of violent programmes has not increased but the number of violent acts per programme has increased. Halloran and Croll (1972) found that violence was a common feature on TV programmes but not as prevalent on British as it was on American TV programmes. Cumberbatch (1987) supported this, finding that 30% of programmes had violence in them but only 1% of TV is violent overall. Gunter and Harrison (1995) said that violence only occupies a tiny proportion of TV in few programmes. They found that 1% of terrestrial TV was violent and less that, 2% on satellite TV was violent. Altogether there is not very much violence on TV but what there is seems to be concentrated to a few programmes which if young children are exposed to could be damaging to them mentally
Often in addition, violence goes unpunished showing children that it is alright to commit violent acts, they won't be punished for it. The children who saw the film were compared with children who hadn't, the children who watched the film were found to be more aggressive in their play. a man had his house broken into, caught the burglars in his house and he shot them, was this a justified act of violence? It was highly publicised because of this. The problem with longitudinal studies is that there could be many other potential intervening variables especially when studying over a long period. From this study called the National Violence Media Study only 4% of violent programmes showed and anti violent theme and children's programmes were the least likely of all to show the long-term negative consequences of violence. Research portrays children as helpless victims of the media's influence but it has been shown that children can critically talk about the media at age seven. The child's upbringing, background, culture and peers could all influence any possible aggressive behaviour. The media does also have pro-social effects as well as anti-social ones, if the catharsis theory is correct then it can relieve aggressive feelings and prevent aggression in real life. In Poland, the researchers agreed that a greater preference for violence at an early age was related to later aggression but the effects were not large and the results should be treated cautiously. Cumberbatch (1997) criticised this study saying that there was actually no evidence to support this. Both of these studies are laboratory studies and the problem with these is that it is difficult to generalise findings to real life situations. =In a longitudinal study by Lefkowitz et al. Centrewall 91989) compared South Africa, Canada and USA.
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