Media Violence and Aggression in Children
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In response to the point of view that exposure to media violence causes children to act with aggression and violence, opponents of this argument have highlighted research studies that disprove the causal relationship between media violence and violent behavior. Moreover, researchers such as Jonathan Freedman (2002) have challenged the validity and logic of the research methods and data of research studies that support this causal hypothesis. Apart from his discussion on the research studies on the effects of media violence, Freedman (2002) also debunked arguments that have been used to support the causal relationship between aggression and media by highlighting the flaws in these perspectives. Other opponents of the argument such as Todd Gitlin (1994) have argued that media violence has merely been employed as a scapegoat for politicians to divert attention from the actual social causes that have contributed to the perpetration of violence in society. The simplistic association of exposure to media violence and aggression has also been questioned by other researchers. Finally, some opponents such as Gerard Jones (2000) have even contended that media violence is a positive factor that enables children to cope with their dark and self-destructive feelings without resorting to actual violence. The following section will present these perspectives in a concise and comprehensive fashion. Several laboratory experiments conducted to investigat
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her hand, it was the neutral programs that created the largest changes in children in both the high-aggression and low-aggression groups.
A field experiment conducted by Messner (1986) sought to determine the nature of the correlation between media violence and crime in 281 metropolitan areas. Instead of finding a positive correlation between the variables, Messner (1986) found that high exposure to violent television content was associated with low rates of violent crime.
Another common type of research studies used to evaluate the impact of media violence is characterized by their comparison of communities that had television and those without television. Based on the fact that new television licenses were prohibited between 1949 and 1952 in the U.S., Hennigan, Del Rosario, Health, Cook, Wharton and Calder (1982) sought to compare the relationship between communities that had television and those that did not have them during this time-period. Therefore, if television ownership caused criminal behavior, communities with televisions would experience higher rates than those without. In addition, after obtaining televisions, the communities that originally did not have televisions would start experiencing the same types
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Approximate Word count = 5155
Approximate Pages = 21 (250 words per page)
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