AskEssays.com - Discover essay samples

Impact Of Television Violence In Relation To Juvenile Delinquency

4.9 of 5.0 (70 reviews)

Contains
1233 words
Category
Social Issues

Impact Of Television Violence In Relation To Juvenile Delinquency page 1
Impact Of Television Violence In Relation To Juvenile Delinquency page 2
Impact Of Television Violence In Relation To Juvenile Delinquency page 3
The above thumbnails are of reduced quality. To view the work in full quality, click download.

When children are taught how to tie their shoes, it is because of how
their parents showed them. When children are taught how to do math problems it
is because how their teachers show them. With all of the role models how does
television effect our children?
Many adults feel that because they watched television when they were
young and they have not been negatively affected then their children should not
be affected as well. What we must first realize is that television today is
different than television of the past, violence is more prevalent in todays
programming unlike the true family programming of the past.

EFFECTS OF TELEVISION - THE BEGINNING

Questions about the effects of television violence have been around
since the beginning of television. The first mention of a concern about
television's effects upon our children can be found in many Congressional
hearings as early as the 1950s. For example, the United States Senate Committee
on Juvenile Delinquency held a series of hearings during 1954-55 on the impact
of television programs on juvenile crime. These hearings were only the beginning
of continuing congressional investigations by this committee and others from the
1950s to the present.
In addition to the congressional hearings begun in the 1950s, there are
many reports that have been written which include: National Commission on the
Causes and Prevention of Violence (Baker & Ball, 1969); Surgeon General's
Scientific Advisory Committee on Television and Social Behavior (1972); the
report on children and television drama by the Group for the Advancement of
Psychiatry (1982); National Institute of Mental Health, Television and Behavior
Report (NIMH, 1982; Pearl, Bouthilet, & Lazar, 1982); National Research Council
(1993), violence report; and reports from the American Psychological
Association's "Task Force on Television and Society" (Huston, et al., 1992) and
"Commission on Violence and Youth" (American Psychological Association, 1992;
Donnerstein, Slaby, & Eron, 1992). All of these reports agree with each other
about the harmful effects of television violence in relation to the behavior of
children, youth, and adults who view violent programming.
The only thing that we know about the effects of exposure to violence
and the relationship towards juvenile delinquency we gather from correlational,
experimental and field studies that demonstrate the effects of this viewing on
the attitudes and behavior of children and adults.
Children begin watching television at a very early age, sometimes as
early as six months, and are intense viewers by the time that they are two or
three years old. In most cases the amount of televised viewing becomes greater
with age and then tapers off during adolescence. ). The violence that is viewed
is more important than the amount of television that is viewed. According to
audience rating surveys, the typical American household has the television set
on for more than seven hours each day and children age 2 to 11 spend an average
of 28 hours per week viewing. (Andreasen, 1990; Condry, 1989; Liebert & Sprafkin,
1988)
The most important documentation of the amount of violence viewed by
children on television are the studies conducted by Gerbner and his colleagues
on the nature of American television programs. The results of these yearly
analyses of the amount of violence on American television for the 22-year period
1967-89 indicate a steady but growing high level of violence. (Gerbner &
Signorielli, 1990) Programs especially designed for children, such as cartoons
are the most violent of all programming. How many times have we all seen the
Coyote try to kill the RoadRunner? GI Joe and many other programs also represent
violence and the use of deadly weapons.
Overall, the levels of violence in prime-time programming have averaged
about five acts per hour and children's Saturday morning programs have averaged
about 20 to 25 violent acts per hour. (Lichter & Amundson, 1992) However a
recent survey by the Center for Media and Public Affairs identified 1,846
violent scenes broadcast and cablecast between 6 a.m. to midnight during one day
in Washington, D.C. The most violent periods were between 6 to 9 a.m. with 497
violent scenes (165.7 per hour) and between 2 to 5 p.m. with 609 violent scenes
(203 per hour). (Lichter & Amundson, 1992) Most of this violence is shown
during hours that are not generally viewed by the adults therefore violence in
the early morning and afternoon is viewed by children and youth.

CORRELATIONAL EXPERIMENTS

What are the effects of this televised violence on our children? What we
know about the influence of TV violence comes from the research of correlational,
experimental and field studies that have been conducted over the past 40 years.
The amount of evidence from correlational studies is very consistent in showing
the effects of violence in relation to children: In most cases viewing and
having a preference for watching violent television is related to aggressive
attitudes, values and behaviors.
During 1972 Robinson and Bachman (1972) found a relationship between the
number of hours of television viewed and adolescent reports of involvement in
aggressive or antisocial behavior. During that same year Atkin, Greenberg,
Korzenny, and McDermott (1979:5-13) used a different measure to determine
aggressive behavior. They gave nine to thirteen-year-old boys and girls
situations such as the following. Suppose that you are riding your bicycle down
the street and some other child comes up and pushes you off your bicycle. What
would you do? The response options included physical or verbal aggression along
with options to reduce or avoid conflict. This group found that physical or
verbal aggressive responses were selected by 45 per cent of heavy-television-
violence viewers compared to only 21 percent of the light-violence viewers.
During 1983 Phillips (1983:560-568) recorded the effects of the
portrayal of suicides in television soap operas on the suicide rate in the
United States using death records he gathered from the National Center for
Health Statistics. He found, over a six-year period, that whenever a major soap
opera personality committed suicide on television, within three days there was a
significant increase in the number of female suicides across the nation.
The major experimental studies of the cause and effect relation between
television violence and aggressive behavior were completed by Bandura and his
colleagues (Bandura, Ross & Ross,1961:575-582, 1963:3-1) working with young
children, and by Berkowitz and his associates (Berkowitz, 1962; Berkowitz &
Rawlings, 1963:405-412; Berkowitz, Corwin & Heironimus, 1963:217-229) who
studied adolescents. A young child was given a film, then projected on a
television screen, the film showed a person who kicked and beat an inflated
plastic doll. The child was then placed in a playroom setting and then they
recorded the amount of times that aggressive behavior was seen. The results of
these early studies indicated that children who had viewed the aggressive film
were more aggressive in the playroom than those children who had not observed
the aggressive person.
The answer seems to be yes. Several studies have demonstrated that one
exposure to a violent cartoon leads to increased aggression. During 1971,
Hapkiewitz and Roden (1971:1583-1585) found that boys who had seen violent<...

You are currently seeing 50% of this paper.

You're seeing 1233 words of 2466.

Similar essays


Accusations By The Media

To ensure a free society, our forefathers granted us the universal right to free speech. This meant that anyone could be scrutinized, if the information was true, by the media. The LAPD officers who beat Rodney King were scrutinized; Richard Nixon was scrutinized; even Jerry Springer has been scrutinized. These turned out to be true, and that i...

173 reviews
Download
Sexual Harassment

Over the years, many people have believed that the issue of sexual harassment should not be discussed in public. Sexual harassment was to be discussed behind closed doors. In spite of this, the social and political systems have changed instantaneously. This social problem has affected men and women throughout time, however, i...

88 reviews
Download
Rise of the American Women

The rise of the ?American? women There are many things that were impacted after the World War I and World War II. For instance, there was the ?great migration? that changed the lives of an estimate of a half of a million African-Americans, which were given the opportunity to migrate from the South to the North. They were given t...

31 reviews
Download
Love In Today's Society

Introduction A key to understanding Sociology and the Social Sciences in general is to evaluate subjects through time and compare and contrast characteristics that have changed and those that have remained the same. For this assignment I have elected to access three sources dealing with love; in three distinct time periods in the modern er...

58 reviews
Download
Leadership

Alison Hendrick Mrs. Graham 1-17-13 6[th] hour Essay is defined as the position of a function of a leader, a person who guides or directs a group. is perceived in many different ways. It has been categorized into five groups: head, expert, manage, lead, and character. Throughout history, there have been many people who have displayed leadersh...

201 reviews
Download
Communication Skills

are all around us, from the day we are born until the rest of our lives. How many times have you seen communication skills required for a job in the classifieds and wonder what it actually means. A communication skill is some type of skill used in communication, From talking, body language to even listening. Many things can effect the way one ca...

70 reviews
Download
Issues On Gun Control

When the framers of the Constitution penned one of the most influential works in history, they could never consider what the consequences of the freedoms they set forth. The second amendment of the Constitution is one of the most important and most frequently called upon that recent history can think of . Since the age of the Civil War, the weapons...

101 reviews
Download
Analysis of Gangs

Gangs are a violent reality that people have to deal with in today?s cities. What has made these groups come about? Why do kids feel that being in a gang is both an acceptable and prestigious way to live? The long-range answer to these questions can only be speculated upon, but in the short term the answers are much easier to fi...

53 reviews
Download
Women In The Labour Force December 17, 1992

The past decades their has been a dramatic increase of women participating in the labour force from countries all over the world including Canada. In 1950, one Canadian worker in five was a woman. By 1980 this percentage had doubled, and women are expected to make up more than 44 percent of the labour force by the end of this century. The...

196 reviews
Download
Prejudice

is a terrible thing. As long as people still roam the Earth, will never cease. How ever long that we the people stay here on Earth, that is how long will last. We have tried to abolish , but it always comes back full force. People take into consideration peoples race and ethnicity, and if it is different from theirs, then that person probably...

123 reviews
Download
Love

What is love and how does it start? It may seem like a stupid question, but on second examination, it does not seem quite so stupid. After all, love is a feeling. How can we really describe what a feeling is or means? The meaning of any feeling can differ greatly between individuals, and the meaning of love is no different. True love is about n...

181 reviews
Download
Communication

What is communication? * " is sharing information among two or more persons" (Pence & Justice, 2008, p. 16). * requires a sender and receiver. * Formulation - thoughts gathered * Transmission - thoughts conveyed * Reception - message received * Comprehension - message understood * Writing * Braillie * Nonverbal facial expressions and postur...

72 reviews
Download
Gender Inbalances In School

The science and engineering professors' job is to educate. They are placed in the position of authority and told to educate the people. The people, are the students of the University of Rhode Island. When the school is broken down by gender I imagine that there equal if not greater numbers of females than males. But when the individual colleges...

24 reviews
Download
Teenage Sex

Teenagers in the United States are experimenting with sexual activities more and more today than ever before. According to Charles Krauthammer, ?Sex oozes from every pore of the culture and there?s not a kid in the world who can avoid it.? (Meier, 1994, p. 7). Teenagers are surrounded by some sort of sexual connotations all the t...

13 reviews
Download
Atsisiųsti šį darbą