The Effects of Viewing Television Violence on School Children

Shelton (1998) commented that a results of the National television Violence Study confirmed the worst fears of the American Medical Association (AMA) and other public health and

other children's advocates in that [prime time TV violence has been seen as increasingly on both broadcast and cable networks. The study found that much of the aggression that appears no television is glamorized, sanitized, and trivialized. About 60 percent of all entertainment programming was found to contain some type and level of violence, a figure that has remained constant over the past three years (Federman, 1996, 1997, 19980).

Violent programming has increased 14 percent on broadcast networks and 10 percent on cable. Shelton (1998) further states that about 90 percent of programming on cable services such as Cinemax, Showtime and HBO, depicts violence. Research suggests that the context in which violence is portrayed is an important factor in assessing its impact on children; when the violence is perpetrated by an attractive character, the chances are increased that viewers will become desensitized to aggression or become fearful of violence in their own world. Cartoon violence, which is endemic in children's programming, has the potential to seem realistic to children younger than 7 because they cannot easily differentiate between reality and fantasy, thus posing a special conc

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lence by children is linked to greater aggressiveness; specifically, children who regularly view TV programs in which violence is realistic, frequently repeated, or unpunished are more likely to imitate what they see (Children and TV violence, 1999). Children in the United States spend more time watching TV than learning in the classroom or interacting with positive, personal adult role models (Bar-on, 1999). By the time a child is 18 years old, he or she will have seen 16,000 murders on the screen and heard some 14,000 sexual references and innuendos (Bar-on, 1999). Over 4,000 studies have been published to date that measure the effects of TV violence on children (Bar-on, 1999), but debate over this topic continues to rage. Given the substantial body of scholarly research that has identified a linkage between excessive viewing of TV violence and emergent aggressive behaviors, the present study was developed to shed additional light on a topic of great social concern. Purpose of the Study The purpose of the study is to examine the effects of viewing television violence on a sample of elementary school children and to determine if any correlation exists between such variables as amount of time spent watching TV, type and con
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Approximate Word count = 2656
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)

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