Media Violence

Media Violence

Studies have shown that media violence affects child behavior. According to several researchers, media violence show to children cannot only influence child behavior, but the behavior of those children as they become young adults. Although there have been few that contradict studies claiming media violence to affect children, many of the studies give weak responses and conculsions.. Since it is unrealistic to try and keep children from seeing any media violence, the logical solution would be to have media with messages against violence.

Most of the studies claim to support the notion that media violence affects children. “Since the 1950s, more than 1,000 studies have been done on the effects of violence in television and movies. The majority of these studies conclude that: children who watch significant amounts of television and movie violence are more likely to exhibit aggressive behavior, attitudes and values.”(National Institute of media and family, 2006) More support comes from a fifteen year study that concludes “Children's viewing of violent TV shows, their identification with aggressive same-sex TV characters, and their perceptions that TV violence is realistic are all linked to later aggression as young adults, for both males and females.”(Partenheimer 2003) Although most studies agree to claim that media violence does affect children, many of these studies have concluded to be "a positive, though weak, relation between exposure to television violence and aggressive behavior.”(Media Awareness Network 2008) Most studies come to the same conclusion about media violence, but many studies are open to interpretation because of weak results.

The weak results of some studies can be attributed to three causes: “First, media violence is notoriously hard to define and measure,” “Second, researchers disagree over the type of relationship the data supports,” “Third, even those who agree that there is a connection between media violence and aggression disagree about how the one effects the other.”(Media Awareness Network 2008) These three reasons can make it easy for one for misinterpret