Área: CIENCIAS APLICADAS A LA ACTIVIDAD PROFESIONAL Curso: 4º ESO C
5. Presentar y defender en público el proyecto de investigación realizado
The point of this section is not to diminish the efforts of research into violence and effects, over many decades. A great deal has been learned from these efforts. But every approach to research does have its problems which work against drawing absolute conclusions about media influence and violence. There is a difference between believing that media have long-term attitudinal effects on their audiences, and setting this up as a hypothesis to be proven. And a further problem is that given audiences are not society as a whole. Nor are individuals who may be influenced separate from the audience as a whole. Part of the problem may well be that as yet we are simply not up to the kind of theorizing needed to argue and proved such affects: ‘there is no adequate vocabulary to describe the relationships between the media, individuals, and society’ (Curran and Seaton, 1997).
Here are some brief critiques of research approaches by way of example.
7.1 Content analysis
This depends on assumptions about how one defines violence in a given medium, how one categorizes types of violence and then on how one measures incidents – by number, for example, or by time/space given to them.
The kind of study carried out by Cumberbatch in 1989 for the BBC used elaborate categories, and in the end indicated that the incidence of violence on television had gone down over the previous ten years, even though this might not have fitted with public perceptions.
But in any case the key assumption behind this methodology is that the number of incidents will be significant and necessarily implies an effect on the audience. In fact this does not follow. One might read violent novels all day and every day without this proving anything about how the material is made sense of, or affects the reader.
In a summary of content findings Potter (1999) asserts among others, the following content findings about TV violence
G rates of violence fluctuate across different types of programmes;
G rates are higher for verbal violence than for physical violence;
G violent crime is much more frequent on TV than in real life;
G most perpetrators are white, middle-aged and male;
G a high proportion of violence is committed by ‘good’ characters;
G consequences for victims are rarely shown;
G weapons are often found in violent acts;
G much of the violence is portrayed in a humorous context.
In elaboration on these points he comments on the fact that white characters are more likely to be portrayed as police officers, whereas African American and Latino characters are more likely to be portrayed as criminal suspects. He refers to the fact that the serious physical, emotional and psychological consequences of violence are rarely portrayed. Again, one’s concern for the implied consequences of this kind of represen- tation need to be modified by uncertainty as to how, in any given examples, such features may or may not be taken seriously by the audience. The difficulty lies in uncertainty about how various audience members may or may not incorporate such ‘facts’ within their world views. As Gunter (1985) put it: ‘Major problems arise when moving from statements about what the content implies, as assessed by objective analy- sis of its inherent structures, to how it is actually perceived and interpreted by the audience.’
7.2 Laboratory experiments
These are inherently ‘unreal’ because they take place under artificially controlled condi- tions. They remove the influence of everyday surroundings and influences – the context of life.
The well-known Bandura experiments of the 1960s with Bobo the doll were said to have demonstrated how violence could be transferred from play to social behaviour in children (and it may be argued that media consumption is a kind of play). However, and apart from the fact that not all the children showed this transfer, the experimental conditions removed normal social constraints on violent behaviour. Also, they arguably set up the children in a frame of mind where they would behave in ways which they could see might please the researchers (Bandura, 1973; Bandura et al., 1963).
7.3 Field experiments
These are only as effective and significant as the quality of their questions and the reliability of their respondents – let alone the validity of what sense the researcher makes of a given set of responses.
Belson (1978) produced a widely reported piece of research which seemed to proved that heavy television viewing and violent behaviour were connected in respect of teen- age males. One problem among others was that the work depended on the recall of respondents. It is a common experience for researchers to find the people’s memory is selective and erratic. There is also the question of the backgrounds of respondents, and how far these correlate with a preference for violent material. In this case, 38 per cent of boys from working-class homes admitted to violent social behaviour, as opposed to 13 per cent from non-manual working social groups. And indeed, the boys who committed most aggressive acts in life were in fact only moderate viewers of violence.
Barker and Petley (2001) have demonstrated that children will lie to researchers (in this case about videos which they could not have seen because they did not exist). Questions and discussions which depend on recall of violent material are suspect, to the extent that our ability to remember things is selective and fallible. Research can be seen as tendentious if, for example, it has preselected and predefined its material as being violent – ‘here are some violent videos, I want you to talk about them’. And research involving children may contain its own sets of fallacies. For example, we tend to general- ize about how we define children and what they are like as a category. In fact, there are many ways of distinguishing categories under the heading of ‘child’ – all of which may change understanding of media effects.
8 Effects models and their problems
Effects models are inherently problematic because they are hypothetical. Do they arise as a result of carrying out experiments (which we have just said will have their own drawbacks)? Or are they propositions prior to experimentation? (In which case they are just a notion, but one which will influence how experimentation is carried out.)
8.1 Hypodermic models – short term and behavioural
These models are about short-term cause and effect, and include so-called copycat kill- ings. They are discredited, in spite of having a hold on the popular press and the popular imagination because it has never been demonstrated that media violence leads to violent behaviour. Even copycat killings have been shown to exist in certain kinds of context – usually of the social environment – which render them exceptional rather than usual. However, they may be a response to some media behaviour. In any case, a number of such examples have revealed false claims and blame on the media. For example, in September 2000, in a well-publicized court case, a 15-year-old Florida male blamed his abuse of his 8-year-old sister on ideas presented in an edition of the Jerry Springer Show. He lied: the show was blameless.
8.2 Cultivation model – long term and attitudinal
The cultivation model of accumulated media effects leading to an internalized ‘climate’ of violence is also imperfect, though attractive in its willingness to look at long-term effects and at attitude change as much as at behaviours [see Gerbner et al., 1986]. It suggests that heavy television viewing cultivates a negative view of the world as being a violent place. Refinements of the theory through research over a period of time have added notions such as that of the general or mainstream television view of violence, among other effects areas. It has also been suggested that effects vary between different social groups.
One problem is that it relies quite heavily on content analysis, of television in particular (see above). It also assumes that ‘heavy’ users of television are more likely to be influenced than are ‘light’ users. This does not necessarily follow, and ignores other factors which might in fact cause a light user to be influenced (first-hand experience of violence, for example). It assumes that television viewing is as much a passive as an active experience.
Other approaches to long-term effects have looked at children in particular. Some research has suggested that childhood viewing of violence may be related to aggressive behaviour in adulthood. However, the evidence is not conclusive, given the range of socializing influences that may produce such an effect.
Media Representations of Violence: Conditions surrounding effects
This great array of factors relates to the social and media experience of individual members of an audience, as well as to characteristics of media and of their texts. Such a variety of conditioning factors makes it difficult (some would say impossible) to distinguish particular effects of exposure to representations of media violence – let alone to determine particular causes of any effects which may be proposed.
There is no space here to offer a more lengthy critique, which has in any case been well done by others. But examples of other models which have led to inconclusive or negative results when tested in experiments include.
8.3 Innoculation theory
This proposes that experience of media violence leads to desensitization and toleration of violent behaviour. This has been no more proven than Aristotle’s theory of catharsis, which proposes the opposite – that experience of violence (through drama) purges vio- lent thoughts and impulses in the audience. Feshback and Singer (1971) in particular have explored the idea that violence on TV can make some viewers less likely to commit violence in life.
8.4 Uses and gratifications theory
This proposes that we use media material to gratify certain internalized needs that drive our behaviours in general. Apart from the fact that this model has been little used to evaluate violent material and violent behaviours, persuasive as it is, it is predicated on the fact that such needs actually exist. Their existence as an internal mental structure is itself predicated on categorizing human behaviours. So far as violence may be related to this model, it would seem to fit in with a need for diversion and entertainment. But then there is nothing in the model that suggests, for instance, that reading crime thrillers with violent incidents in them has any influence on behaviour or on attitudes to violence. If anything, the effect is to make the reader feel better for having been diverted.
It would seem that a general problem with research into media and violence is selectivity of approach and a failure to take whole views of problems, methodologies and the range of work in the field.
. . . if research of the 2000s is to better comprehend the import of media violence and
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achieve more practical results, it must be directed by an overall view, that is, it must theoretically embrace media violence as well as the power of culture, the active audi- ence, and the economy, power relations, and media technology in society. It must, therefore, combine teleological understanding and causal explanations, and quantita- tive and qualitative methodology. It must also leave the simplified notion of ‘entertain- ment violence’ aside and realise that the borderlines between fictional and non-fictional media violence are often blurred and sometimes non-existent, and that all kinds of media violence are cultural or symbolic constructions.Von Feilitzen (1998)