Violent Televisions Influlence on Childrens Behaviour Essay

Violent Televisions Influlence on Childrens Behaviour Concern about children and popular media has a long history. Plato proposed to ban poets from his ideal republic, because he feared that their stories about immoral behaviour would corrupt young minds. In modern times, moral pressure groups have tried to protect children from popular literature, the music hall, the cinema, comics, television and video nasties. Its important to see the issue of TV violence and childrens behaviour in a broader social, cultural and historical context. Why is it such a popular subject? This isnt often the fate of academic research issues. Well, it may be partly that its a convenient scapegoat. Blaming the†¦show more content†¦This perspective represents the dominant paradigm in TV research. In its crudest form the relationship between children and television is portrayed as a matter of single cause and direct effect, which puts this kind of research firmly in the behaviourist tradition: based on whats sometimes referred to as the magic bullet theory. Approaches have become more sophisticated in recent decades, stressing such complicating factors as the variety of audiences, individual differences and the importance of intervening variables. The early survey work in the 1950s by Wilbur Schramm and his colleagues in the US and by Hilde Himmelweit and her colleagues in Britain are remarkably cautious compared with many later studies. Both present children as active agents rather than passive victims, unlike most of the research in the 1960s. Both Schramm and Himmelweit suggested that the effects of television violence vary according to the personal and social characteristics of viewers, and according to how violent acts were portrayed. Sociological research has in fact tended to stress longer-term changes in behaviour and the enmeshing of television with the rest of social life, whereas psychological research has tended to focus on short-term changes in behaviour, treated in isolation in the