On Thu, 11 Apr 2002, Stephen Black went: > I've been laying low on this interesting issue
I'd been wondering where you were. > the real reason I'm writing: an unassuming final paragraph in a news > report in Nature on the Johnson (2002) study. (It drove me crazy > until I remembered where it was). It said: > > "The link between television and violent behaviour is still far > from clear, believes Helena Hird...For example the Atlantic > island of St. Helena only got television a few years ago. > Children there have not become more aggressive, possibly because > they live in close-knit, carefully supervised communities" > > Is this a published study? If so, it would provide a nice > counter-example to the Williams study so widely cited. > > At: http://www.nature.com/nsu/020325/020325-9.html Thanks, Stephen--that was most helpful. I did a PsycInfo search and found 27 publications on the _absence_ of an increase in violence in St. Helena following the introduction of TV. You can see them all at www.charm.net/~dhe/helena.html Here's the first one: Charlton, Tony; Davie, Ronald; Panting, Charlie; Abrahams, Mick; Yon, Lilla. Monitoring children's behaviour in a remote community before and six years after the availability of broadcast TV. North American Journal of Psychology. Vol 3(3) Dec 2001, 429-440. Abstract Teachers rated nursery class children's behavior 18 months before, and 68 months after the availability of broadcast TV on the island of St Helena. Across a period of seven years, and almost six years of TV, findings showed few significant differences between teachers' ratings of the two cohorts. In particular, with the 2000 cohort there was no evidence of increases in the types of anti-social behaviors that TV is often alleged to encourage. Stephen also wrote: > it's one thing to decry the lack of effective research; it's another > to produce it. Because of ethical considerations and our in ability > to push parents and kids around, credible experiments are just about > impossible to do. I think it would be possible to replicate and extend the experiment done by Cameron and Janky in 1971 (www.charm.net/~dhe/cameron.html). They apparently managed to push parents and kids around (although I haven't seen more than the abstract, so I don't know the details). As far as ethics are concerned--violent TV is not tobacco smoke or asbestos; there remains (as far as I can see) a state of clinical equipoise about its deleterious effects. If deleterious effects could be identified, the benefits to everyone would outweigh the risks to study participants. The risks of not doing the research (or of making social policy based on our current level of knowledge) seem greater than the risks of doing it. But I admit that it wouldn't get through _our_ IRB. :) --David --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
