Violence on Television

Politicians, journalists, various community groups, and many, many others have been criticizing television producers and the television networks with increasing intensity in recent years concerning the amount and degree of violence depicted. Some counter that there is much more violence on the network news than on fictionalized television programs, suggesting that these television programs simply reflect a very violent society. These discussions and assertions rarely include actual data to support anyone's claims. This exercise, therefore, emphasizes the role of research in this dialogue, and may provide a "reality check” against some of the claims and accusations that have garnered a lot of attention. To complete this assignment you will need to watch multiple instances of each of the following three types of programs on a major network: children's Saturday morning or after-school cartoons, prime-time programs, and the network news. While watching the program, you should use the handout below to code the content for various scenes of physical or verbal aggression or related issues. You can choose your programs with or without random sampling. Watch 2-3 programs of each type carefully and to use the handout to code the various acts of aggression and related incidents. For consistency's sake, each program selected should be coded for 30 minutes (minus commercials). For programs that last an hour or more, you should flip a coin and select either the first or last 30 minutes. Calculate the average number of the various incidents for each category of program. Try to make a prediction before you collect your data, and then see whether or not the numbers were higher or lower. Discuss the implications of these results, in the context of the issues raised in the Aggression chapter, as well as the modules on gender, culture, and media on aggression, and the social learning theory (from a previous block). Submit your table with your 750 word report on your findings.
the show instances may be slightly made up though