TV Images Effect on Children
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Television is a phenomenon that affects children and adolescents in almost every industrialized country in the world, particularly the United States and Western Europe. Some studies have indicated that children spend more time watching television than in school, and by the time they graduate from high school, are more socialized by advertising, depictions of reality, and the way they perceive violence. In fact, most of the research on children and television has centered around the question regarding children and the perception and action of violent self-behavior, or suicide (Palmer, 1980). Suicide and suicidal attempts are, contrary to popular wisdom, quite frequent in childhood and adolescence. Even in the 1970s, suicidal death was shown to be one of the fastest growing childhood and adolescent problems, ranking fourth as the leading cause of death in the fifteen-to nineteen-year age group (Toolan, 1987, p.339). This view is echoed in the more current literature in the field, and also emphasizes that 59 to 71 percent of surveyed adolescents and children believe suicide to be a potential for most within that age group (Domino, et al., 1988-89, p. 359). Similarly, attitudes toward death within the fabric of American society have significantly changed in post World-War II society, primarily because of the pervasive influence of television and the rapid rise in the importance of the media. Prior to the advent of the media age, most Americans lived in smaller, more tight
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n fact, act as a preventative measure (Pfeffer, 1986).
It seems as if there are several issues at stake in this problem. For instance, does television or motion picture violence cause imitative behavior? Is this behavior necessarily suicidal, or is the suicide "accidental?" Do news portrayals of suicide make the adolescent think more about suicide, or fear it? It would be impossible to study all of these in a single research proposal; therefore, it might behoove us to limit the study to the investigation of whether seeing violent behavior in the media does indeed provoke similar violent feelings.
There have been generational studies done with children and aggression that show there is a definite ebb and flow of type and quality of "war-play." Even in the time period of the Korean and Second World Wars, as well as the Vietnam era, there did not seem to be the amount and fluctuation of violent behavior for children as there is when tracked against a normative baseline of television violence. As more and more television programs focus on death and dying, and even more sophisticated means of killing, children learn by imitation and either take out their aggression on the playground or with their own brand of self-destructive be
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Approximate Word count = 2216
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)
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