Adolescents & Suicide
Suicide and suicidal attempts are, contrary to p
This is an excerpt from the paper...
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 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 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 tightly knit communities. Both suicide and accidental death were thus experienced at a more personal level members of the community facing the situation locally (Fulton and Owen, 1988).As television and motion pictures grew in popularity, however, images of violence, death, and suicide formed more of a cognitive pattern within the framework of popular culture. Films such as "Halloween," "The Road Warrior," and "Rambo" depict death in vivid color and often in slow motion. This detailed destruction of humans serves to eclipse the meaning of death and lessen its impact upon the viewer. Conversely, this media image of dea
. . .
hey do suggest that their results may have been colored by a differing attitude toward suicide in general, they also believe that television newscasts about suicide may, in 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 would therefore be two ways in which to investigate this problem in a systematic manner. One would be to provide a questionnaire to members of a target adolescent group after showing them a particularly violent video. The other would be to get access to medical records of adolescents who attempted suicide and survey their responses to a series of questions. Perhaps the most logical method would be to use a combination of the two in order to extrapolate a se
. . .
Some common words found in the essay are:
Baron Reiss, Fulton Owen, Bollen Phillips, , Selected Adolescents, Warrior Rambo, Phillips Carstensen, Attempted Suicide, World War II, Sociological Review, violent behavior, imitative behavior, attempted suicide, television stories, adolescents attempted suicide, adolescents attempted, fulton owen, fulton owen 1988, owen 1988, selected adolescents, suicides television stories, television movies, children adolescents, american sociological review, domino etal 1988 89,
Approximate Word count = 1698
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)
More Essays on Adolescents & Suicide
Suicide and suicidal attempts are, contrary to p
|
Customer Service
to Over
32,000 Professionally Written Papers!!!
