Popular Children's Program: Codename: Kids Next Door
A Study of Violence in a Popular Children’s Program: Codename: Kids Next Door
A Content Analysis
Abstract
Analysis of the children’s program Codename: Kids Next Door this paper will examine the average percentage of violence in this popular children’s program. The objective of this study was to analyze how many violent acts were present in the first season of the show and try to analyze exactly the amount of demonstrated acts are being portrayed. Methods: This study examined the first season of the program to record: perpetrator, victim, what type of violent act was presented, what the effects of the act resulted in, and if any structural damage resulted. Results: Main findings indicated that …show more content…
there were at least 73 violent acts coded for during this season and many averages showed that they were done by the use of weapon opposed to physical acts of violence. This analysis suggests that the large amounts of violence portrayed in this program could have an impact of behavior from what is portrayed in this show. Future research could benefit from drawing on this research and analyzing further the effects of the average percentages of violence demonstrated.
Introduction:
Violence in television has been a topic of study by many researchers, but the research of the show Codename: Kids Next Door is one that has not been featured. The violence studied in this show has found similar to literature about how many violent acts are presented often in each hour show though what has not been found is exactly the realism and fictional interaction of these violent acts and if children are perceiving these interactions demonstrated as being ok or not. The main question that was hypothesized is if the violent acts demonstrated in the show give a real interaction of the real world or if the animated violence is seen more as a feature of entertainment, and exactly how many violent acts are being presented throughout the first season of this show. This paper examines the demonstrated behaviors of violent acts in the popular children’s programming of Codename Kids Next Door which was featured on the Cartoon Network. The paper will begin with analyzing past literature from researchers that studied the effects of aggression and behavior that may be correlated by the amount of television watched as well as how many incidents of violence on average were shown, then to begin the study of Codename Kids Next Door with the conceptual definitions of coding, and measures used, analysis of the findings, limitations to the study and finally the discussion of the study as compared to past literature used.
Literature Review:
Violence and children’s programming has been a topic that researchers have studied to try to find overall concept of what the effects of viewing constant hours of these shows can do for the children’s behaviors and or exactly how much violence is portrayed (Hasan, 2013, Kirsh, 2006, Miller et al, 2012, Wilson et al, 2002). In a public opinion poll 75% of American adults believed that televised violence contributed to real world crime and aggression (Wilson et al 2002). Though this public opinion poll never specified which genres of televised violence or programming were discussed. Children’s programming has been a focus of study to examine the effects of behavior and aggression in comparison to the amount of violent acts portrayed. Cartoon programs have been around for over 80 years with the network program of Cartoon Network being a favorable channel with its twenty-four hour access in over 80 million homes and 145 countries (Hassan 2013). Though with the television programming having a targeted population of younger children the content provided in some shows contain numerous incidents of violence and unrealistic content which has been shown to lead to more aggression among school aged children, effects on family violence, and discovering on average how many violent acts are shown through these programs. The following four literature reviews help examine the prevalence of violent acts in children’s programs as well as some of the effects it has been demonstrated with the exposure of these acts.
In Hassan’s study his work focused on trying to answer the questions of analyzing Cartoon Network’s programming as a whole network to see if there any effects of behavior by the exposure of children’s programming and the use of violent acts. The focus of his work was with two hypotheses the first one was to see if the behavior of school aged children in class influenced by the frequency of the cartoons they watched and the second was does violence presented in the cartoons influence the behavior of the children (Hassan 2013). The sample conducted was a random sample composited of 300 children which have television sets in their homes with the age groups being between 6-13 years of age. The results of the study supported both the first and second hypothesis and analysis that “there exists a strong association between watching cartoon programs and the behavior of children in class, and the violence presented in the cartoons have a strong association with the behavior of children” (Hassan 2013).
Kirsh (2006) also found in his work that was similar to Hassan’s study that aggression was noted throughout the use of cartoons. He found that cartoons had more frequency of violent acts than that of an adult drama. This is a prevalent concern for the use of interaction which children are viewing and exactly how this affects the behavior of the young viewers. The term of disinhibiting was also analyzed through his work which states that youth readily enact previously learned aggressive behaviors which may be of that due to the viewing of television programs that contain numerous acts of violence. This idea also focused on the reality of children’s programs to the content in which was featured, the idea that was used as an example is that a child may not understand that one cannot hit someone in the head to make their head spin around as that in the shows. These effects that are not of reality may be an issue of aggression that can result from the unrealistic violence portrayed.
To continue analyzing exactly what violent aggression is being demonstrated from children’s shows, another study found that family violence and that of which contained sibling aggression could be resulted from how many hours of television a child may be watching (Miller et al. 2012). In their findings they found that their model of aggression was correlated to the amount of violent programming that is watched and what other family violence is viewed within the home. Though this work does not only focus on what children are viewing on television it also focuses on real life experiences within the child’s environment. They found that on average children were watching more than 2 to 5 hours of television each day 84% of time, 10% watching 6 to 9 hours of television each day and 3% with over 10 hours of television (Miller et al 2012). This analysis of how many hours of television each child on average was watching is a large effect for which they further analyzed exactly of which children also experienced at least one violent act outside the home too. Their findings found similar to other researchers of Hassan (2013) and Kirsh (2006) that aggression was higher in those that watched more television than that of those children that did not. Though their results did have a second analysis of examining violence in the community and home it was still useful to examine the use of aggression with in terms of the amount of television viewed.
The question of exactly how many violent acts are being presented in children’s programs was what Wilson et al. (2002) studied which tried to examine more about how the aggression could be portrayed in the children’s programs and also try to study quantitative research of how many incidents of violence are in cartoons and programs children may be exposed to. In their findings they found that children’s programs were more likely to feature violence than any other genre that was studied and the violence that was depicted were more likely to be in animated materials than that of other children’s shows. They found that children are exposed to about 14 different violent acts between a perpetrator and a victim in every hour of television program or about 1 violent act every 4 minutes (Wilson et al 2002). So with their study presenting this average number of violent acts being presented it can be analyzed why there may be more aggressive behavior noted in other research of children’s behaviors from learned behavior of these shows and that of the demonstrated violent acts.
Through the past research presented there has shown a need to examine the interaction of violent acts that are presented and what these occurrences may affect for the behaviors of children. What has not been focused with the literature was the research of examining specifically just one favorable show that would be on Cartoon Network which was noted to be a worldwide twenty-four hour network which is why the study presented on violence and the show Codename: Kids Next Door is an important study to analyze.
Methods:
For the study, I viewed the first season of Codename: Kids Next Door which consisted of thirteen episodes. The episodes were not chosen in any randomized order, just viewed in numerical order to report on incidents of violence.
The coding process that was used to code violence had the incident of each violent act as being the unit of analysis. Each portrayal of a violent act was coded with analyzing the variables of identifying the perpetrator, victim, if the act was physical or use of weapon, if the act resulted in the victim falling down or if they were still standing, and finally if any structural damage was present after the incident. Each coded measurement used a binary method of using 1s and 0s for each variable. After each item was coded the use of
Violence was defined as any incident one deliberately induces harm on another through the use of physical touch such as: shoving, kicking, or through the use of a device or object that can be used as harm to someone or structural damage. Using this defined analysis of a violent incident was what was used to code and determine any incident that appeared to following these guidelines.
To identify the perpetrator they were identified as the individual that acted upon the use of a violent act. The binary coding consisted of male and female, if the perpetrator was male that was coded as a 1 and if female that was coded as 0.
The victim was coded with using gender binaries and identifying if the victim was male and female. The victim was the individual that the perpetrator acted upon the violent act to in trying to attempt harm. If the victim was male the coding was a 1 and if female a 0.
To determine if the violent act resulted in a physical action or the use of a weapon was coded by analyzing the perpetrator’s act and if they used any part of their body such as hands, feet, knee, elbow or any other body part to harm an individual or if the use of a weapon was used. The acts commonly identified for analysis were kicking, pushing, shoving, which affected the victim. If the incident was physical it was coded as 1 and if the use of a weapon were used it was coded as 0.
If the victim’s effects after the act had resulted in the victim to fall to the ground after the act this was measured by analyzing how many times a victim had fallen to the ground by the violent act or if the impact did not make them fall to the ground. If the victim fell to the ground this was coded as 1 and if the victim did not fall to the ground it was coded as 0. This measurement was used to determine the effect of violent acts that affected each victim.
Structural damage was used to determine to see if the violent act that was measured caused any damage to structures. This was measured by analyzing the incident more closely to look for any damage to structures such as buildings, tables, fixtures or anything that was intact prior to the violent act. If the violent act presented had created any damage to any structure it was coded as 1 and if no structural damage was recorded immediately resulting from the act it was coded as 0.
Results:
The results of the content analysis suggest that acts of violence occurred more with males being perpetrators and more incidents of the use of weapon. The measured variables presented showed that there were a total of 132 incidents of violence though these measured acts did not produce enough information across all variables measured so through the use of listwise deletion the final number of acts used to present were 73 violent acts. The above incidents that were deleted resulted from having characters that were not human which were fictional characters or were also groups of the Kid’s Next Door or the Delightful Children from Down the Lane, the enemies of the Kid’s Next Door so it made it challenging to use the coded information in final analysis.
Perpetrators:
Table 1: Perpetrators
Male
75.34%
Female
24.66%
The Perpetrators that were noted had been more male with being over three times more likely to be doing an act of violence toward a victim. This is more considerate to analyze since there are more male characters of 3:2 for total characters. So this information does not suggest that males are more violent in since the proportion of male to female ratio was so small of main characters. Female characters that included the use of villains were only the perpetrators less than one fourth of the time which could be suggested since they were a gender minority for the entire show as well and never given much opportunity to take charge in their position to be a perpetrator as they were often a follower. Victims:
Table 2: Victims
Male
67.12%
Female
32.88%
The victims presented showed that over half of the victims were male characters as compared to just being about one third were that of female characters. This information analyzed was not surprising since most of the characters were male which includes the main characters as well as the villains. This measurement was one that presented that fit the model of the show with the breakdown of representation of gender. Physical and Weapon Use
Table 3: Type of Violent Act
Physical
34.25%
Weapon
65.75%
The measurement of recording if the violent act was presented by the use of physical interaction or the use of a weapon became one that showed that weapon use was used about two-thirds more throughout the season than that of physical violence. Figure 1 explains this analysis better with giving a visual image. This was a prevalent indicator that showed that violence with the use of weapon would be favored by characters in shows because of the ease of shooting a character with a weapon device which often would do more effect to the victim than that of using physical violence. From a social stance this may be exposing children and viewers of this program to see that the use of the fictitious weaponry that was created by the Kids Next Door is ok to use on other people, because it was shown so many times in the program. Victim Effects After Violent Act
Table 4: Victims Effects After Violent Act
Fall
63.01%
Stand
36.99%
This analysis of the effects what each victim experienced was shown that the victim was more likely to have an impact of falling to the ground after the use of a physical act or use of weapon.
Figure 2 gives more detail to the presenting issue of this program and how the effects of each violent act are portrayed. This is important to notice for the fact that the victims impact that most victims experienced a large number of about two-thirds of the time they would fall to the ground from the act, while one third they would maintain standing without falling to the ground even though many characters never showed a lot of pain, blood, or other resulting injury besides a few times of being showing some scrapes on their face. Though the characters never really experienced real life pain presented in the cartoon program this is something that may lead viewers to believe that it would be ok to hurt someone and they would not get too injured even though that is not the …show more content…
case. Structural Damage
Table 5: Structural Damage
Yes
5.48%
No
94.52%
These results were surprising that with all the violent acts that being presented that the structural damage was not higher overall. As shown there was a very small percentage of structural damage that was presented of being only just a little over 5% resulting in the entire season of the program. Though another finding that was analyzed further is the use of structural damage overall in terms of episodes which featured little to no structural damage in any episode resulted from a violent act. This result was due to the use of the likewise deletion that was used to make more accurate final results which many of the structural damage that was presented was due to the use of a group or through the use of a creature that was not human.
The final results of this content analysis suggested a lot of information about the use of violence in cartoons such as Codename: Kids Next Door in just how many violent acts do appear in the entire season of the program. This does show that a large number of the violent acts presented were through the use of a weapon and often had resulted in the victim falling to the ground due to the effect. That is something that is important to recognize since there was no measure used for pain as a variable which could have been able to identify how each victim responded to the violent act and what bruises may have been present. Since this is a cartoon and it is meant to be fictional hopefully viewers do not see this show as being on that they feel that the weapons created and the use of violence that was presented would be ok to do to others.
Limitations:
Some analysis of limitations which made this study much harder for research purposes was the use of the coding indicators and only using binary measures for each of the studied measures. This was one of the limitations which resulted in much smaller coded violent acts which resulted in the use of a listwise deletion. Had there been a more exhaustive list of measures and scales this research would be more accurate than that of what was actually give a larger focus of what the meaning of the results. The other issue with the coding process was the use of gender which made some coding records become an issue for the villains who were not human and or did not possess a specific gender. Another limitation that was indicated in the overall study was the use of only using season one of the three season series for the show which though the shows are all segmented and do not have any specific running order episodes in later seasons would help depict more analysis. If there was another similar study to this research the use of more measures that used more scales and description for coding would help overall for making a more accurate.
Discussion:
Although by no means attempting to be final word on the subject, the current content analysis and study is a first step toward an understanding of representations of violence in the children’s program of Codename: Kids Next Door.
While the work does not have an exhaustive measure of resulting variables or work in attempting to record each violent act effectively with the given methods this study is one that has results that can be common for that of which this program offers. The findings that were shown does fit the presented information of Wilson et al (2002) which studied that there were about 14 incidents of violence in one hour program and 1 in every 4 minutes. The findings from this study also showed that if research was to average out the amount of total recorded incidents to the amount of episodes studied it would be about 6 which were analyzed. So this does give a larger meaning that cartoon programs have high amounts of violent programs in their shows though this is often in the use of fictional violence in which characters are never seriously injured or hurt which can leave the social effects of real life violence needing to be continued to analyzed with aggression and that context that children understand the perceived shows are fictional. This is something that no research has found if the perception of these shows have any effect on children’s behaviors with the high exposures of violence and what is reality or
fictional.
References
Hassan (2013). Cartoon Network and Its Impact on Behavior of School Going Children.
International Journal of Management, Economics, and Social Sciences Vol 2 (1) pp
6-11.
Kirsch (2006). Cartoon Violence and Aggression In Youth. Aggression and Violent Behavior
11. 547-557.
Miller et al (2012). The Associations Between Community Violence, Televised Violence,
Intimate Partner Violence, Parent-Child Aggression, and Aggression in Sibling
Relationships of Sample of Preschoolers. Psychology of Violence vol 2 No. 2 165-178.
Wilson et al (2002). Violence in Children’s Television Programming: Assessing the Risks
International Communication Association.
Appendix
Figure 1. Type of Violent Act. This figure illustrates the average percentage of violent act used in the analyzed episodes.
Figure 2. Victim’s Effects After Violent Act. This figure illustrates the average percentage of effects the victim experiences resulting from a violent act.
A Content Analysis
Abstract
Analysis of the children’s program Codename: Kids Next Door this paper will examine the average percentage of violence in this popular children’s program. The objective of this study was to analyze how many violent acts were present in the first season of the show and try to analyze exactly the amount of demonstrated acts are being portrayed. Methods: This study examined the first season of the program to record: perpetrator, victim, what type of violent act was presented, what the effects of the act resulted in, and if any structural damage resulted. Results: Main findings indicated that …show more content…
there were at least 73 violent acts coded for during this season and many averages showed that they were done by the use of weapon opposed to physical acts of violence. This analysis suggests that the large amounts of violence portrayed in this program could have an impact of behavior from what is portrayed in this show. Future research could benefit from drawing on this research and analyzing further the effects of the average percentages of violence demonstrated.
Introduction:
Violence in television has been a topic of study by many researchers, but the research of the show Codename: Kids Next Door is one that has not been featured. The violence studied in this show has found similar to literature about how many violent acts are presented often in each hour show though what has not been found is exactly the realism and fictional interaction of these violent acts and if children are perceiving these interactions demonstrated as being ok or not. The main question that was hypothesized is if the violent acts demonstrated in the show give a real interaction of the real world or if the animated violence is seen more as a feature of entertainment, and exactly how many violent acts are being presented throughout the first season of this show. This paper examines the demonstrated behaviors of violent acts in the popular children’s programming of Codename Kids Next Door which was featured on the Cartoon Network. The paper will begin with analyzing past literature from researchers that studied the effects of aggression and behavior that may be correlated by the amount of television watched as well as how many incidents of violence on average were shown, then to begin the study of Codename Kids Next Door with the conceptual definitions of coding, and measures used, analysis of the findings, limitations to the study and finally the discussion of the study as compared to past literature used.
Literature Review:
Violence and children’s programming has been a topic that researchers have studied to try to find overall concept of what the effects of viewing constant hours of these shows can do for the children’s behaviors and or exactly how much violence is portrayed (Hasan, 2013, Kirsh, 2006, Miller et al, 2012, Wilson et al, 2002). In a public opinion poll 75% of American adults believed that televised violence contributed to real world crime and aggression (Wilson et al 2002). Though this public opinion poll never specified which genres of televised violence or programming were discussed. Children’s programming has been a focus of study to examine the effects of behavior and aggression in comparison to the amount of violent acts portrayed. Cartoon programs have been around for over 80 years with the network program of Cartoon Network being a favorable channel with its twenty-four hour access in over 80 million homes and 145 countries (Hassan 2013). Though with the television programming having a targeted population of younger children the content provided in some shows contain numerous incidents of violence and unrealistic content which has been shown to lead to more aggression among school aged children, effects on family violence, and discovering on average how many violent acts are shown through these programs. The following four literature reviews help examine the prevalence of violent acts in children’s programs as well as some of the effects it has been demonstrated with the exposure of these acts.
In Hassan’s study his work focused on trying to answer the questions of analyzing Cartoon Network’s programming as a whole network to see if there any effects of behavior by the exposure of children’s programming and the use of violent acts. The focus of his work was with two hypotheses the first one was to see if the behavior of school aged children in class influenced by the frequency of the cartoons they watched and the second was does violence presented in the cartoons influence the behavior of the children (Hassan 2013). The sample conducted was a random sample composited of 300 children which have television sets in their homes with the age groups being between 6-13 years of age. The results of the study supported both the first and second hypothesis and analysis that “there exists a strong association between watching cartoon programs and the behavior of children in class, and the violence presented in the cartoons have a strong association with the behavior of children” (Hassan 2013).
Kirsh (2006) also found in his work that was similar to Hassan’s study that aggression was noted throughout the use of cartoons. He found that cartoons had more frequency of violent acts than that of an adult drama. This is a prevalent concern for the use of interaction which children are viewing and exactly how this affects the behavior of the young viewers. The term of disinhibiting was also analyzed through his work which states that youth readily enact previously learned aggressive behaviors which may be of that due to the viewing of television programs that contain numerous acts of violence. This idea also focused on the reality of children’s programs to the content in which was featured, the idea that was used as an example is that a child may not understand that one cannot hit someone in the head to make their head spin around as that in the shows. These effects that are not of reality may be an issue of aggression that can result from the unrealistic violence portrayed.
To continue analyzing exactly what violent aggression is being demonstrated from children’s shows, another study found that family violence and that of which contained sibling aggression could be resulted from how many hours of television a child may be watching (Miller et al. 2012). In their findings they found that their model of aggression was correlated to the amount of violent programming that is watched and what other family violence is viewed within the home. Though this work does not only focus on what children are viewing on television it also focuses on real life experiences within the child’s environment. They found that on average children were watching more than 2 to 5 hours of television each day 84% of time, 10% watching 6 to 9 hours of television each day and 3% with over 10 hours of television (Miller et al 2012). This analysis of how many hours of television each child on average was watching is a large effect for which they further analyzed exactly of which children also experienced at least one violent act outside the home too. Their findings found similar to other researchers of Hassan (2013) and Kirsh (2006) that aggression was higher in those that watched more television than that of those children that did not. Though their results did have a second analysis of examining violence in the community and home it was still useful to examine the use of aggression with in terms of the amount of television viewed.
The question of exactly how many violent acts are being presented in children’s programs was what Wilson et al. (2002) studied which tried to examine more about how the aggression could be portrayed in the children’s programs and also try to study quantitative research of how many incidents of violence are in cartoons and programs children may be exposed to. In their findings they found that children’s programs were more likely to feature violence than any other genre that was studied and the violence that was depicted were more likely to be in animated materials than that of other children’s shows. They found that children are exposed to about 14 different violent acts between a perpetrator and a victim in every hour of television program or about 1 violent act every 4 minutes (Wilson et al 2002). So with their study presenting this average number of violent acts being presented it can be analyzed why there may be more aggressive behavior noted in other research of children’s behaviors from learned behavior of these shows and that of the demonstrated violent acts.
Through the past research presented there has shown a need to examine the interaction of violent acts that are presented and what these occurrences may affect for the behaviors of children. What has not been focused with the literature was the research of examining specifically just one favorable show that would be on Cartoon Network which was noted to be a worldwide twenty-four hour network which is why the study presented on violence and the show Codename: Kids Next Door is an important study to analyze.
Methods:
For the study, I viewed the first season of Codename: Kids Next Door which consisted of thirteen episodes. The episodes were not chosen in any randomized order, just viewed in numerical order to report on incidents of violence.
The coding process that was used to code violence had the incident of each violent act as being the unit of analysis. Each portrayal of a violent act was coded with analyzing the variables of identifying the perpetrator, victim, if the act was physical or use of weapon, if the act resulted in the victim falling down or if they were still standing, and finally if any structural damage was present after the incident. Each coded measurement used a binary method of using 1s and 0s for each variable. After each item was coded the use of
Violence was defined as any incident one deliberately induces harm on another through the use of physical touch such as: shoving, kicking, or through the use of a device or object that can be used as harm to someone or structural damage. Using this defined analysis of a violent incident was what was used to code and determine any incident that appeared to following these guidelines.
To identify the perpetrator they were identified as the individual that acted upon the use of a violent act. The binary coding consisted of male and female, if the perpetrator was male that was coded as a 1 and if female that was coded as 0.
The victim was coded with using gender binaries and identifying if the victim was male and female. The victim was the individual that the perpetrator acted upon the violent act to in trying to attempt harm. If the victim was male the coding was a 1 and if female a 0.
To determine if the violent act resulted in a physical action or the use of a weapon was coded by analyzing the perpetrator’s act and if they used any part of their body such as hands, feet, knee, elbow or any other body part to harm an individual or if the use of a weapon was used. The acts commonly identified for analysis were kicking, pushing, shoving, which affected the victim. If the incident was physical it was coded as 1 and if the use of a weapon were used it was coded as 0.
If the victim’s effects after the act had resulted in the victim to fall to the ground after the act this was measured by analyzing how many times a victim had fallen to the ground by the violent act or if the impact did not make them fall to the ground. If the victim fell to the ground this was coded as 1 and if the victim did not fall to the ground it was coded as 0. This measurement was used to determine the effect of violent acts that affected each victim.
Structural damage was used to determine to see if the violent act that was measured caused any damage to structures. This was measured by analyzing the incident more closely to look for any damage to structures such as buildings, tables, fixtures or anything that was intact prior to the violent act. If the violent act presented had created any damage to any structure it was coded as 1 and if no structural damage was recorded immediately resulting from the act it was coded as 0.
Results:
The results of the content analysis suggest that acts of violence occurred more with males being perpetrators and more incidents of the use of weapon. The measured variables presented showed that there were a total of 132 incidents of violence though these measured acts did not produce enough information across all variables measured so through the use of listwise deletion the final number of acts used to present were 73 violent acts. The above incidents that were deleted resulted from having characters that were not human which were fictional characters or were also groups of the Kid’s Next Door or the Delightful Children from Down the Lane, the enemies of the Kid’s Next Door so it made it challenging to use the coded information in final analysis.
Perpetrators:
Table 1: Perpetrators
Male
75.34%
Female
24.66%
The Perpetrators that were noted had been more male with being over three times more likely to be doing an act of violence toward a victim. This is more considerate to analyze since there are more male characters of 3:2 for total characters. So this information does not suggest that males are more violent in since the proportion of male to female ratio was so small of main characters. Female characters that included the use of villains were only the perpetrators less than one fourth of the time which could be suggested since they were a gender minority for the entire show as well and never given much opportunity to take charge in their position to be a perpetrator as they were often a follower. Victims:
Table 2: Victims
Male
67.12%
Female
32.88%
The victims presented showed that over half of the victims were male characters as compared to just being about one third were that of female characters. This information analyzed was not surprising since most of the characters were male which includes the main characters as well as the villains. This measurement was one that presented that fit the model of the show with the breakdown of representation of gender. Physical and Weapon Use
Table 3: Type of Violent Act
Physical
34.25%
Weapon
65.75%
The measurement of recording if the violent act was presented by the use of physical interaction or the use of a weapon became one that showed that weapon use was used about two-thirds more throughout the season than that of physical violence. Figure 1 explains this analysis better with giving a visual image. This was a prevalent indicator that showed that violence with the use of weapon would be favored by characters in shows because of the ease of shooting a character with a weapon device which often would do more effect to the victim than that of using physical violence. From a social stance this may be exposing children and viewers of this program to see that the use of the fictitious weaponry that was created by the Kids Next Door is ok to use on other people, because it was shown so many times in the program. Victim Effects After Violent Act
Table 4: Victims Effects After Violent Act
Fall
63.01%
Stand
36.99%
This analysis of the effects what each victim experienced was shown that the victim was more likely to have an impact of falling to the ground after the use of a physical act or use of weapon.
Figure 2 gives more detail to the presenting issue of this program and how the effects of each violent act are portrayed. This is important to notice for the fact that the victims impact that most victims experienced a large number of about two-thirds of the time they would fall to the ground from the act, while one third they would maintain standing without falling to the ground even though many characters never showed a lot of pain, blood, or other resulting injury besides a few times of being showing some scrapes on their face. Though the characters never really experienced real life pain presented in the cartoon program this is something that may lead viewers to believe that it would be ok to hurt someone and they would not get too injured even though that is not the …show more content…
case. Structural Damage
Table 5: Structural Damage
Yes
5.48%
No
94.52%
These results were surprising that with all the violent acts that being presented that the structural damage was not higher overall. As shown there was a very small percentage of structural damage that was presented of being only just a little over 5% resulting in the entire season of the program. Though another finding that was analyzed further is the use of structural damage overall in terms of episodes which featured little to no structural damage in any episode resulted from a violent act. This result was due to the use of the likewise deletion that was used to make more accurate final results which many of the structural damage that was presented was due to the use of a group or through the use of a creature that was not human.
The final results of this content analysis suggested a lot of information about the use of violence in cartoons such as Codename: Kids Next Door in just how many violent acts do appear in the entire season of the program. This does show that a large number of the violent acts presented were through the use of a weapon and often had resulted in the victim falling to the ground due to the effect. That is something that is important to recognize since there was no measure used for pain as a variable which could have been able to identify how each victim responded to the violent act and what bruises may have been present. Since this is a cartoon and it is meant to be fictional hopefully viewers do not see this show as being on that they feel that the weapons created and the use of violence that was presented would be ok to do to others.
Limitations:
Some analysis of limitations which made this study much harder for research purposes was the use of the coding indicators and only using binary measures for each of the studied measures. This was one of the limitations which resulted in much smaller coded violent acts which resulted in the use of a listwise deletion. Had there been a more exhaustive list of measures and scales this research would be more accurate than that of what was actually give a larger focus of what the meaning of the results. The other issue with the coding process was the use of gender which made some coding records become an issue for the villains who were not human and or did not possess a specific gender. Another limitation that was indicated in the overall study was the use of only using season one of the three season series for the show which though the shows are all segmented and do not have any specific running order episodes in later seasons would help depict more analysis. If there was another similar study to this research the use of more measures that used more scales and description for coding would help overall for making a more accurate.
Discussion:
Although by no means attempting to be final word on the subject, the current content analysis and study is a first step toward an understanding of representations of violence in the children’s program of Codename: Kids Next Door.
While the work does not have an exhaustive measure of resulting variables or work in attempting to record each violent act effectively with the given methods this study is one that has results that can be common for that of which this program offers. The findings that were shown does fit the presented information of Wilson et al (2002) which studied that there were about 14 incidents of violence in one hour program and 1 in every 4 minutes. The findings from this study also showed that if research was to average out the amount of total recorded incidents to the amount of episodes studied it would be about 6 which were analyzed. So this does give a larger meaning that cartoon programs have high amounts of violent programs in their shows though this is often in the use of fictional violence in which characters are never seriously injured or hurt which can leave the social effects of real life violence needing to be continued to analyzed with aggression and that context that children understand the perceived shows are fictional. This is something that no research has found if the perception of these shows have any effect on children’s behaviors with the high exposures of violence and what is reality or
fictional.
References
Hassan (2013). Cartoon Network and Its Impact on Behavior of School Going Children.
International Journal of Management, Economics, and Social Sciences Vol 2 (1) pp
6-11.
Kirsch (2006). Cartoon Violence and Aggression In Youth. Aggression and Violent Behavior
11. 547-557.
Miller et al (2012). The Associations Between Community Violence, Televised Violence,
Intimate Partner Violence, Parent-Child Aggression, and Aggression in Sibling
Relationships of Sample of Preschoolers. Psychology of Violence vol 2 No. 2 165-178.
Wilson et al (2002). Violence in Children’s Television Programming: Assessing the Risks
International Communication Association.
Appendix
Figure 1. Type of Violent Act. This figure illustrates the average percentage of violent act used in the analyzed episodes.
Figure 2. Victim’s Effects After Violent Act. This figure illustrates the average percentage of effects the victim experiences resulting from a violent act.