The Effects of Media on Youth
Research on media violence is often misunderstood by the general public. One reason has to do with research methodology. We can’t randomly assign children early in their lives to watch different dose of violence on television then 15 years later see which children committed violent crimes. Then again the same the same type of limitation also exist for medical research: we can’t randomly assign groups of people to smoke different amounts of cigarettes for 15 years and then count the number of people who developed cancer.
Tobacco researchers conduct co relational studies in which they look at the amount people have smoked during their lives and then chart the rate at which they have succumbed to cancer. They control statistically for other factors, of course--other healthy and unhealthy behaviors that either reduce or promote the tendency to develop cancer, over and above these other influences. Since they can’t do cancer experiments on people, they use animal studies. These are artificial, but they tell us something about short- term effects of tobacco that can’t be found from co relational studies. Putting the two types of research together, we now have powerful data about the effects of smoking on the development of cancer.
Similarly, media violence researchers do long longitudinal studies of children’s media exposure and look at the types of behaviors they engage in over time. They also control for other factors such as previous aggressiveness, family problems, and such( Johnson, J.G., Cohen, P., Smailes, E. M., Kasen, S, & Brook, J. S. (2002). Television viewing and aggressive behavior during adolescence and adulthood. Science, 295, 2468-2471). They don’t look at media violence in a vacuum; they examine whether there is a correlation between television viewing and violent behavior, even controlling for other influences. They also do experiments, such as the animal experiments for cancer, these are not natural situations, but such experiments fill the
Tobacco researchers conduct co relational studies in which they look at the amount people have smoked during their lives and then chart the rate at which they have succumbed to cancer. They control statistically for other factors, of course--other healthy and unhealthy behaviors that either reduce or promote the tendency to develop cancer, over and above these other influences. Since they can’t do cancer experiments on people, they use animal studies. These are artificial, but they tell us something about short- term effects of tobacco that can’t be found from co relational studies. Putting the two types of research together, we now have powerful data about the effects of smoking on the development of cancer.
Similarly, media violence researchers do long longitudinal studies of children’s media exposure and look at the types of behaviors they engage in over time. They also control for other factors such as previous aggressiveness, family problems, and such( Johnson, J.G., Cohen, P., Smailes, E. M., Kasen, S, & Brook, J. S. (2002). Television viewing and aggressive behavior during adolescence and adulthood. Science, 295, 2468-2471). They don’t look at media violence in a vacuum; they examine whether there is a correlation between television viewing and violent behavior, even controlling for other influences. They also do experiments, such as the animal experiments for cancer, these are not natural situations, but such experiments fill the